Muslimama

We know more than that . . .

2010-03-07T19:40:00.004+09:00

Today, amongst our junk mail, we got a catalogue from a supermarket that had a few pages of baby stuff. Looking at it got me thinking about how many products available today are premised on the notion that judgement based on our observations is essentially untrustworthy: at-home baby scales, bath thermometers, spoons that change colour when the food's too hot, clothes that change colour when the baby's too hot, the line in the disposable nappy that changes colour when it's saturated with pee. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with using any of these products, and I'm not in favour of being cavalier when it comes to baby's safety, but it seems to me that the fact that all these 'helpful' products exist belies a basic distrust of ourselves - as if the evidence of our senses and the work of our bodies are unreliable. This notion undermines our trust in ourselves as mothers. We don't need those all those things . . . we know and can do more than that.

Breastfeeding

2010-01-08T20:49:00.004+09:00

Breastfeeding was a topic on talkback radio today because a study has been published that says that whether a child is breastfed or not is not the sole determiner for the health of the baby. The study claims the hormonal environment when the baby is in the womb has a strong effect on the health of the baby. I haven't checked for the original study results, so I don't know if they are saying breastfeeding is not important at all or whether it's part of a panel of factors that influence babies' health. But in the newspaper and it was presented as "formula feeding is just as good as breastfeeding" and on talkback radio the topic was, 'Is formula feeding as good as breastfeeding?'

These days I'm giving K a bottle of formula before bed. He had been refusing to breastfeed at that time of night for a few months, but he was waking up so often at night. You should have seen him suck down that bottle once he realised what it was for -- he was really hungry! So I don't have anything against formula. But we are the only species that feed our babies milk from another species . . . from a biological standpoint it is just not possible that milk from a cow could be better suited to human babies than milk from a human. I don't even know why people still bother debating that. Of course babies also thrive on formula and it is God's blessing that we have formula in our lives and are able to use it to feed our babies! But scientifically, the formula v breast milk question is a moot point.

I suppose it is easier for our fast food news to deal with that topic than the other, more complex issues that affect feeding choices, which fan out from things that affect it directly like breastfeeding education and lactation support during pregnancy and after birth, to funding and infrastructure for health care, and how much of that could be allocated for different birthing options and the lactation support that could go along with that, funding for things like nursing rooms in public areas like train stations, issues about the general level of awareness/attention to nutrition (Australia has now overtaken America and is the fattest nation in the world! Why would be care about the nutritional benefits of breast milk when we are preparing the babies for a life of overeating and inattention to nutrition?), to issues about how women, mothers, and bodies fit into our society and our collective consciousness.

But overall, I think Australia seems to be very pro-breastfeeding.

I've found breastfeeding over the past few months, since we came to Australia, a bit stressful because it took a while to readjust once he got well established on the solids. Or maybe it just took me a while to see the new pattern! Anyway, now we have a rhythm again and things are going pretty smoothly. K has had an ear infection in both ears this week and he was feeling really crappy and he seemed to find drinking mummy's milk soothing when he was sick. I was really glad that I had stuck it out through the tough time and when I was looking at him breastfeeding, seeing how calm and content he was even though he felt sick, it was really one of the most rewarding moments in my breastfeeding experience so far.

Violence and racism: Australia, you disappoint me

2010-01-07T09:20:00.005+09:00

Something that has really surprised and disappointed me about Australia since I got back is how violent life has become here, and how racist it is. I'm not sure if it has got worse while I've been living overseas, or I was just immune to it before.

The voilence has definitely increased since I left, I think. Guns are illegal here, so people are using knives instead. There is a report of a stabbing/knife attack a few times a week. The police have just been given the power to search somebody if they suspect them of having a knife. There have been knife attacks in nightclubs and pubs, and attacks around the streets. A lot of people are dying from these attacks. Melbourne, the capital city of my state, seems really violent and unsafe at night these days. I am glad we have decided not to live there. (We are living in a country town of 10,000 people.)

The big news this week has been the stabbing of a young Indian man on his way to work at a fast food restaurant. There was no reason for the attack, but he was stabbed in the street. He stumbled into the restaurant all bloody and crying for help, but he ended up dying. There have been many violent attacks against Indians in Australia (most of them in Melbourne) over the past year or so. For a while, the government tried to turn a blind eye to it. The Prime Minister called it something like "a regrettable fact of urban life". But Indian students have been protesting about it and asking for more help and security, and the media in India has got a hold of it and is reporting about how unsafe Australia is for Indians now. They have issued a travel warning for Indians considering coming to Australia. So finally (unfortunately only because the economy has been threatened, not because of the moral obligation!) the government is getting more on board this issue and are now at least condemning the attacks.

Yesterday in the newspaper they had a list of several of the attacks that have happened to the Indians (or people who were mistaken for Indians). Several of the people had been beaten to death or stabbed to death, and some of the others had suffered brain damage, loss of sight or hearing, as well as broken bones and injured organs. I just cannot wrap my mind around what must be going through the attackers' minds when they do this. I cannot understand how you could keep bashing someone, obviously already injured, to the point of death.

K1, UFC, and other cage fighting "sports" are not to blame for this but I really hate those sports and wondering how someone could bash someone else to death brings these sports to mind. I don't mind the fighting when both opponents are upright and the guy who's losing at least has a chance of getting away, but I hate it when the one guy has pinned the other to the ground so that he can't move, and then just keeps punching him in the head. There is often blood over the mat at the end of those fights. I know it is 'controlled' by the referee and supposed to be somewhat 'safe' for the participants, but I feel sick when I see it on TV. That violence like that has been normalised and served up for viewing with beer and popcorn is one of the f-ed up things about our modern society and just part of the general mindset in which people actually think up the idea of cruising around the streets looking for someone to hurt to the point of death, and do, and we are all too jaded to be outraged.

The fact that a lot of the attacks are racially motivated is another sad thing. It is not surprising that racism is rampant in Australia -- Aborigines were not allowed to vote until 1967! I knew racism was an issue in Australia before I went to Korea, but now that I am back, it seems to be a much bigger problem. It is good that it is being acknowledged somewhat, because you can't work on a problem you don't admit you have. But I don't know how deep that acknowledgement really is, how personally people take that on, and how deeply the government and business will take that on and work to enact systemic changes that could improve the situation.

For example, a report over the past week here was about the likelihood of getting a job interview based on the ethnicity of your name. They sent a bunch of equivalent resumes out with a variety of ethnic names, and recorded who got called in for interviews. Surprise, surprise, those with Anglo-sounding names were called in the most often for interviews. Those with Chinese-sounding names got the least amount of interviews, and those with Middle Eastern-sounding names got the second least amount of interviews.

My son has a Middle Eastern sounding name. I suppose I haven't given that much though to the racism he might encounter in his life, in particular hidden racism like the job interview situation. I just have to pray that he will be safe and given the opportunities he wants and deserves. I have to help him develop his sense of self and feel good about who he is, acknowledge and accept difference, and help him feel positively connected with people and the world around him. I pray he won't feel the alienation and disconnection that could lead to a violent mindset. I pray he will know he is loved and love others. I'm glad he will learn martial arts and have some skills to defend himself if he needed. I pray he will never need to.

What have I been doing with myself?

2010-01-06T15:59:00.003+09:00

Yikes, two whole months without a single blog post! That's sad! The beginning of a new year is a good time to get back into it. (Or maybe a bad time. I read an article in the newspaper a few days ago and some quit smoking organisations were saying planning to quit smoking cold turkey on January 1 is a bad idea, because the party season is not quite over, and then if you break your resolution in those first few days, you give up because you've already failed . . . they recommended waiting a couple of weeks until all the Christmas/New Year festivities were fully finished before starting to quit smoking. Sounds sensible to me, but anyway, I will flout their advice and resolve to start blogging IMMEDIATELY. It is already January 5 so I'm already (predictably) late.)

I miss blogging, this blog and my LiveJournal. I haven't been having a lot of me time. Blogging is part of me time!

Part of not having a lot of computer time was being one adult of four in a house that for a while had only one internet-connected computer (HELL!! Finally we got the wireless hooked up and so there are two computers with internet available. YAY!). Now we have two computers but there are times when I can't get a computer when I have the chance!

Another part of the lack of blogging time is being busy preparing stuff for the opening of our taekwondo school (we had an open day last month that was well attended and we are starting regular classes in a couple of weeks). This is taking up A LOT of time (more than I expected). A lot of K's naps - and about 95% of my computer time (time that used to be spent on the internet!) - is spent doing paperwork for our school. Yesterday I designed a brochure and today I'm working on our Student Orientation Handbook. I like it. I like using my creativity, and it feels so satisfying to be building something from scratch.

I seem busier with K and with basic stuf like washing and drying clothes, preparing his food and feeding him, going to the supermarket (I just made a typo and wrote 'going to the sperm' . . . hahaha . . . hmm, what would Freud make of that?!?!?!?), and going to various boring appointments and errands. We've been doing some fun stuff too -- playgroup, swimming, walking at the lake, outings, and just playing outside on the grass in the yard (most appreciated after life in yard-less Korea!).

He is getting so big! He has begun taking single steps here and there - the kind where he just lunges for the couch/person's legs/bed or whatever as he takes the step, and is practicing standing up by himself. He's so confident and adventurous now. He just sees something and goes for it!

He got his first haircut today. I have the locks of hair in a little bag to stick into his (yet-to-be-obtained) baby book. He looks like a big boy now. His first birthday is in six weeks.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-06T15:54:00.001+09:00

New year, new year's resolution: blog, blog, blog!

heart

2009-10-30T21:05:00.000+09:00

Thank you for all the comments, emails, and phone calls I received after my last post. It made me feel very loved and supported. I learned a lot. I guess with him being more established on solids, feeding less frequently is to be expected. I hadn’t really adjusted my expectations.

Also: fenugreek is amazing! My milk supply increased within a couple of days of starting to take it. I can feel the let down happening faster and more strongly.

Things are not perfect . . . he’s still fussy sometimes, and sometimes won’t feed when I think he ‘should’. He’s getting more teeth, so that might be why. I’d really like him to have a feed before bed. This week he’s fed before bed a couple of times, and a couple of times he hasn’t. The nights he didn’t feed before bed, he woke before midnight and I fed him. But he went back to sleep after the feeds, so I’m not really complaining.

Anyway, thank you so much for the support. I really appreciate you!

Seesaw . . .

2009-10-26T19:12:00.003+09:00

So: sleep and breastfeeding.

I have always been so grateful that even with a tongue tie (him) and one flattish nipple (me), we've not had any troubles breastfeeding. It took a day or so to get him successfully latched and feeding on the flat side in the beginning, and breastfeeding him in public has not really been happening for a few months now because he's so interested in looking around, but generally, we've been blessed with tons of milk, a good latch, consistent weight gain, and an enjoyable, for both of us, breastfeeding relationship.

These days, things have changed . . . I'm really confused and worried. Since we got here, he hasn't been feeding well. It got better for a few days before I wrote my last post, but since then, it's got difficult again. Basically the only time I can get him to feed successfully during the day is straight after he wakes up. I can't really get him to feed any other time. He is still only having two meals of solids per day - I went up to three for a couple of days but I'm really worried about my milk drying up completely due to lack fo feeding, so I've gone back to twice a day in the hopes of getting him feeding properly. Today he woke up at 9am, and went to bed at 8.15pm, and between then, he ate two non-huge meals of solids and breastfed only TWICE. He still wakes twice a night to feed, so that equals four feeds in 24 hours. I don't think that's enough!

I'm not sure about my milk supply. It is taking much longer for the milk to let down, and my breasts never feel really full these days. I've starting taking fenugreek tablets, drinking Akta-Vite (kind of chocolately granules you mix with milk to make a flavoured milk; I read on a mothering forum here that some mothers used it successfully to increase milk supply), and I'm planning on making lactation cookies (but in our town of 10,000 there is no brewer's yeast available until Wednesday when the hardware store gets its next delivery!). He doesn't suck long before he starts fussing (read: crying), so partly he's not sucking long/deeply enough to stimulate the let down, but I still want to take these measures to ensure my milk supply is adequate.

It is awful trying to feed him and just having him cry. I'm also going to try changing the location I feed him to see if that will help him focus to suck a bit more before he starts crying. I don't know what else to do. Any/all suggestions welcome! I am really worried about this and getting to the point of crying about it myself. I almost gave him formula before bed today. I will be totally heartbroken if I can't figure this out and have to stop breastfeeding him.

As for the other end of the seesaw - yes, you did read it correctly above. He went to bed at 8:15pm!!!! I know I am tempting fate by writing it down - every other time I write about some success we have with sleeping, it is followed by a rough patch - but things are definitely getting better with night time sleep! He has been going to bed pretty consistently around 8.30pm and going back to sleep pretty easily after his night time feeds. We are both getting a lot more sleep at night.

I am really grateful for the sleep he's getting at night. I don't worry so much about sleep anymore or spend each day counting up the hours he (hasn't) slept and worrying about him getting up to the recommended amount of sleep. Most nights now, he's getting close to as much sleep overnight as he used to get in the whole 24 hours. Thank you, God.

Eight months old!

2009-10-18T09:12:00.003+09:00

K is eight months old now! It is amazing. I remember when he was born and I was sitting on the couch for what seemed like 20 hours a day breastfeeding . . . just thinking about getting to six weeks, let alone six months, seemed like an eternity away! The time passes so quickly. He's a really healthy, happy eight month old now.

In these photos he is wearing his 'K' overalls that his auntie made for him. She also made overalls for her son (his have an 'S' on them) who is seven weeks older than K. I think when we have a catch up the boys will wear their matching overalls and we will no doubt go crazy with the cameras.

K is getting settled in here. When we first got here, he liked to stay on the rug in the TV area and he wanted me or his dad pretty close to him all the time. But now he's more comfortable, he's happy to leave the rug and he's gradually exploring each room in the house. He loves pulling himself up and standing at the couch, and standing at the little side table beside the couch as well. He also loves to crawl under his Nan and Pa's computer desk and pull/suck on all the little cables there. Not such a great idea, K! He's encountered a door slamming in his face quite a few times when we've seen him take off for the study.

The first week was pretty rough, sleep-wise, but that seems to be settling down a bit too. He's napping well and putting him to bed at night is getting a bit easier. I've been waking him up in the morning to make sure he is up early each day, and that seems to be helping him sleep earlier and more solidly at night. He just hates darkness though! I've been trying to put him to bed with only dim lights on the bedroom, but he just screams! So I've reverted back to putting him to sleep with the overhead light on, and he is quite happy with that!

He is teething like a maniac. He's cut three teeth in the two weeks we've been here, and I can see the bumps of at least two more that are getting ready to pop through. His cheeks got all chapped from the drool, but that is clearing up now too. I have changed to a sippy cup with a hard spout because he was just gnawing on the soft spout with his teeth and I thought he was going to ruin it. We have continued to make good progress with eating solid foods too. He loved the peas, and he's had some chicken that he seemed to like too. Pumpkin is still far and away his favourite.

Overall, I think the move was pretty hard on him. He's cried more in the past three weeks (a week before we left and two weeks since we got here) than he has in the rest of his life! I had been aware of trying to keep things as similar as possible between our place in Korea and what we had here, but that was more difficult that I expected. We didn't bring our furniture, so everywhere he looked, things were different. Also, we are staying with my mum and dad, so there were new people around him all the time too. My parents went to stay with my sister this past week (she had a little baby girl in September) and it was good for K to have a few days with just his mum and dad around, I think. He hadn't been breastfeeding well since we got here. That may have been partly due to the teething, but also due to stress (I've noticed when he's upset he'll feed less). That seems to have normalised again, and he is feeding regularly throughout the day.

I guess I didn't really expect that it would have been that hard for him. I thought because his dad and I would be here with him the whole time, it would minimise the insecurity he might feel with the change of location. But now that I see it was hard for him, and I think about it a bit more, I don't know why I expected a baby would be able to cope effortlessly with something that is difficult even for adults to cope with.

Anyway, he is doing great and yesterday when my parents got back from their trip, K was looking at them very quizzically as if to say, 'So, are you going to be here in my house too?'

Milestone: Solid foods

2009-10-10T17:11:00.003+09:00

This post is well overdue because baby has been eating solids for over a month now!

We started off with cereal about a week after he turned six months old. I know they say you don't really need to give them cereal if you start them on solids after six months, but I decided to give him some cereal because it is easy on a baby's tummy. They say it is bland (and it is -- I tasted it) but I thought that might not be a bad thing: baby would be coping with the new experience of texture without being confused with taste as well. I mixed it with breast milk.

I expected the first solid meal (rice cereal) would be this earth shattering experience that would somehow change the fabric of our little universe . . . but it was almost a non event! I bought some bendable spoons with a dinosaur on the end of the handle. These spoons were almost too exciting -- he was more interested in trying to reach out and grab them than in eating the food.

He has always been a frequent and enthusiastic nurser, so I was expecting that he would happily chow down on solid foods! I was surprised to find that he was quite indifferent to the solids. After the rice cereal, he had sweet potato, apple, oatmeal cereal, and banana. He would accept the banana and oatmeal cereal, but would only eat a couple of bites of apple or sweet potato.

Next I tried pumpkin and he actually liked that! He started to grab the spoon when I brought it towards his mouth and shove it quickly in his own mouth. It was cute! I gave him pumpkin for a few days in a row and having that one food he liked seemed to help him understand what the solid food was all about . . . later on when I went back and fed him the foods he'd had before but hadn't been to keen on, he was more interested. Since then he's also had pears, blueberry, and watermelon. He had the watermelon in the mesh feeder, and he loved it!

He's a messy eater! He grabs the spoon to guide it too his mouth. I let him do that because I think it is a good for him to learn how to be interested in utensils and participate more actively in the feeding. Of course he gets food all over his hands, clothes, his face, and the chair, but I don't mind. I leave him in his PJs until he eats breakfast and then I just take the clothes off and throw them in the wash.

We didn't buy a high chair in Korea and he sat in his rocking chair while he ate. Not ideal, to say the least! But he sits in a high chair here. After being here a week, he understands what the chair is for and when we sit him in it he starts looking around for the food. He looks really cute sitting up in it, and having him sit in the high chair has also improved his sitting up skills in general.

I haven't been very vigilant in making sure he eats solids every day. When we were packing up to move and everything seemed like chaos, it was easier just to nurse him. But now that we are in a more orderly environment, I have been much more diligent. Up till now, he's only been having one solid meal a day, and a snack on a couple of days. Starting today, he's going to have two solid meals per day. I printed out the solid food chart from the Wholesome Baby Food website and I am checking off each food as I introduce it. I can be pretty disorganised and tend towards entropy, so I need a chart like that to keep me on track.

I like watching him eat, especially with the mesh feeder. I also enjoy breastfeeding him more. The phase of exclusive breastfeeding seems to have passed so quickly. At this stage I have no plans to wean him before he wants to self-wean, but I can imagine that that time will come sooner than I expect. So I appreciate more being able to hold him and nourish him with breastfeeding. Experiencing all these little steps towards his independence is bittersweet. I am excited to see him grow, learn, and more and more become his own little person. He is not a totally reliant infant anymore. He's a thriving baby, enjoying his food!

New horizons

2009-10-05T15:41:00.006+09:00

I've been terrible about blogging over the past few weeks. Things inevitably got busy as we prepared to move, and computer time was one of the casualties. Hopefully I'll be better about it now. The baby is napping, but due to wake any minute, so I better be quick with this post!

We arrived here in Australia on Friday. We flew from Seoul-Sydney (9.5 hours) and then Sydney-Melbourne (1 hour). The flights themselves were fine. K was a champ! He had a few short naps, and was cheerful for the rest of the time. There were a few delays with our check in in both Seoul and Sydney (we had to go through customs in Sydney and then transfer and check in again for our domestic flight). In both places checking in took about two hours -- in Seoul becuase of paperwork with my husband's visa and his haidong gumdo sword, and in Sydney because customs was busy and the Qantas domestic terminal was insanely busy! Also, we had a cumbersome amount of carry on baggage, which was a pain in the arse . . . but finally we got to Melbourne and had a happy family reunion with my Mum, Dad, brother, three of my sisters and their husbands, four nephews, and one niece.

We are now at my parents' place, where we are staying for a yet-to-be-determined amount of time, and are settling in okay. It is a little bit weird! Both my husband and myself don't really know what to do with ourselves. It is sort of like, Okay, we are here -- now what?

K is also settling in okay, all things considered. Everything is new for him, and a bit overwhelming, I guess. He has been crying more easily than usual and has been a bit clingy (oh yes, and the inevitable sleeping difficulties, of course!). I felt quite sorry for him on Saturday night. He was tired and overstimulated, and I wanted to calm him down, but there was literally nowhere I could take him that was familiar and soothing because everything was new. In the end I put him in the wrap and watched TV, had a snack, and then walked him to sleep with him held close to me. I'm just focusing on giving him lots of cuddles and attention, and sitting with or being very close to him while he explores the house, and he should feel at home soon. He started to feel more confident today because he moved off the rug in the open plan living area and started to explore some other parts of the room.

Here are some pictures of him enjoying his explorations.

Cloth nappies part I, or Rebecca helped me a lot!

2009-09-15T23:50:00.007+09:00

So far, we have been using a two-part cloth nappy system: flat, square cotton nappies that need to be folded to fit baby, homemade (thanks Rebecca!) fleece liners, a Snappi to do them up (thanks Rebecca!), and waterproof covers. In the small size waterproof covers, I used Bummis Super Brites, and in the (current) medium size, I am using the Bummis Super Whisper Wraps (thanks Rebecca!). This style of nappy is still used quite commonly in Australia, but it is not so popular in the US.

Here is one of our folded nappies with its fleece liner, just waiting for a nice clean baby bum to wrap itself around!

The main reason I chose this style of nappy was because they are the fastest drying of the cloth nappies. We don't have an outdoor area to dry our clothes, just a drying rack in the hallway. I wanted to use the cloth nappies full time, so I needed them to dry quickly. They definitely dry fast.

Overall, I have been pretty amazed by how well these actually work! They are reputed to be the least absorbant of the cloth nappies. But I've found the absorbancy is good . . . they get pretty wet but they can hold a TON of pee. Depending on how you fold them you can put more absorbancy at the front or back. Using the fleece liners was a clever addition because the moisture wicked through the fleece and kept his skin drier than it might otherwise have been. We were getting to the point where I was going to need to add a booster at night (but now I'm not using them at night because I wrecked the covers and they are not properly waterproof anymore). Also, the fleece liners kept a lot of the poop off the nappy and they did not get stained. I had to scrape the poop off the liner with a spoon onto some toilet paper which I then put into the bin. This was not a chore I particularly enjoyed! But I felt good that about the minimal rubbish we were generating with this system. The Snappi works perfectly. Here is a picture of K in a nappy + Snappi, sans cover.

The waterproof covers were excellent at containing leaks. Poop can leak out of these nappies pretty easily because there is no elastic around the legs, but the leaks stayed inside the covers. I preferred the Super Brite covers to the Super Whisper Wraps because the Super Brites had a gusset in the leg which seemed to bunch the nappy up more around the leg and stop poop leaking out onto the cover as often. The Super Brite covers were newer than the Whisper Wraps, so maybe the newer Whisper Wraps also have the gusset in the legs. I never had poop leak out of these covers onto his clothes. Here he's modeling the 'Jungle' print Super Whisper Wrap.

These nappies are the bulkiest of the cloth nappies. Some people don't like that but I think a big nappy bum looks cute! Although he did grow out of clpothes a bit faster due to the size of the nappy (he could wear some of the clothes a bit longer if he was wearing a disposable nappy). The main disadvantage of these for us is becoming apparent now when he twists, wriggles, and turns like mad while I am chaging him: having two layers to put on and do up is a real pain! I want a single layer now so that it is faster and easier to change him. Another disadvantage is you have to fold them, but that doesn't bug me. I just do it while I watch TV.

I stored the dirty nappies dry in a plastic rubbish bin. As far as washing goes, I did not do anything special in the beginning like adding bicarb or vinegar. I think it is easier to start off doing nothing and troubleshoot as problems arise. If you start out with a complicated system, it is harder to figure what is necessary and what is not. I just used regular detergent from the supermarket. After a while they got a bit of detergent build up on them (they were still absorbing fine, but my hands felt kind of soapy after I'd hang them out to dry) so I stripped them very easily just by turning the hot water up as high as it would go and running them through the washing machine without detergent a couple of times. So they have been pretty low maintenance.

The big problem I've had with these nappies is that recently, the covers have lost some of their waterproof-ness. It is fine during the day when I am changing him regularly, but during long naps the edges of his onesie around the legs were getting damp, and at night, quite wet. I couldn't figure out what I had done wrong. I decided to buy a different kind of nappy (not because of the problem with the covers losing their waterproofing, but because we are moving and will be able to dry the nappies outside on the line. Although I think I am just emotionally ready now to make a greater financial investment in nappies!) I've been doing some research and decided on Bumgenius one size pocket nappies. I was reading the care instructions on their website and it said to use additive-free detergent. The instructions with the Bummis covers do not mention additive-free detergent, but I bet that the detergent I have been using ('Tech', for those in Korea) has some kind of additive in it that has ruined the waterproofing.

I ordered the Bumgenius nappies this morning and they will be shipped to Australia so we can use them once we get there. I'll keep using what we have here for the rest of our time in Korea (only a little over 2 weeks *nearly faints*). Writing this post makes me feel quite sentimental about the flat nappies with the covers. Using them was one of the first decisions I made about how I was going to care for my baby so I will always have a soft spot for them.

The myth of the joyful mother

2009-09-13T06:26:00.003+09:00

There is an image of pregnancy, birth, and motherhood -- most nefariously perpetuated by television and movies, I think --in which the woman is happy, healthy, and glowing; enraptured by her body, baby, and birth experience; and blissfully oblivious to the rest of the world. Pregnancy and baby advice in books and on the internet do not, for the most part, do much to shatter that myth. They mention that things can get hard, they write about colicky babies and whatnot, and there's always the very dry section on post partum depression, but nobody ever really gets to the heart of how flat and blue it can feel to be a new mum sometimes.

Pregnancy, birth, and motherhood are more than just physical events in our lives: they are fundamentally transformative processes that touch the core of our existence as women. Very little of the information in books and on the internet is focused on the emotionally and psychologically transformative experience of the mother. It is either focused on the baby (how it is growing inside, things to do to take care of it outside), or on the mother's body as a participant in birth as a medical event. The process of becoming a mother is not just about giving birth to a baby, but about giving birth to a new version of ourselves. When we talk about our birth experiences we talk about 'my birth' . . . and it is our birth, an initiatory experience, the birth of ourselves as mothers.

We talk about the beauty of the birth . . . but there is also blood, poop, mucus, fluid, and pain . . . birth is never a clean and pretty process. Its beauty is in its transformative nature, not in its physical reality. I think it's important to recognise and accept the messy, hard, and painful nature of birth - the birth of our babies, as well as our births as mothers - as well as its lofty and beautiful side.

Our births do not end when the baby is delivered to the world. They continue as we work through the days with our babies . . . and they are no less painful and messy than the baby's physical passage from our bodies. There is happiness and wonder and even rapture with our babies, but there is also lots of hard psychological work wading through feelings of inadequacy, insecurity, alienation. Times when everything feels so important, and we seem to be consistently falling short. There have been moments (okay, days . . . ) when I've felt helpless and hopeless, when my borders seemed so shattered and blurred I wondered if I was even still a person . . .

As mothers we need to speak those difficult parts, to make them real, to make them matter, and to provide an emotional support for those women who are initiated after us. It is not about self-indulgence and wallowing in depression. It is about being real about the experience of motherhood - in all its facets.

We need to find women we trust to share our feelings with. Most of us clamp down on feelings like this, feel frightened to share, and feel alone. Motherhood does get easier with time, and the painful process of rebirthing ourselves softens and our new skins fit more comfortably. The fact that the psychological and emotional difficulties of the early stage of motherhood pass leads to a tendency to downplay it, act like it's not that important because it's transient. But those difficulties are the compost out of which the flower of ourselves as mothers can grow. We we speak our difficulties, or provide space for another woman to speak hers, it creates compost not only for our own growth but for the growth of the other woman, and the growth of our connection and knowledge of that profound place inside ourselves that can look at itself in the mirror and say, I have been lost and gone and come back again, and I am a mother.

Green tea and garlic

2009-09-12T02:16:00.003+09:00

There are many health benefits of green tea. Green tea is the least processed of the main types of tea, and therefore contains the most the most antioxidant polyphenols, in particular a catechin called epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) (Yes, I am a science nerd), which is believed to be responsible for most of the health benefits linked to green tea. Green tea drinkers appear to have lower risk for a wide range of diseases, from simple bacterial or viral infections to chronic degenerative conditions including cardiovascular disease, cancer, stroke, periodontal disease, and osteoporosis. Green tea has caffeine in it, but less than a cup of coffee. It is also metabolised differently and is released into the bloodstream more slowly than the caffeine in coffee, so you don't get the buzz-and-crash that comes with drinking coffee.

I only started drinking green tea since I came to Korea, and even then, I only became a regular drinker of it after I had been here for more than a year and a half. I was living in what would have been a really wonderful apartment near Yaksu station, except for the giant cockroaches! *shudder* I slept with the lights on at night to try and keep them at bay, and nighttime trips to the toilet were a nightmare! My friend gave me an old shoe of hers to keep as my cockroach-killing-shoe.

Anyway, I had a 1pm - 9pm hagwon job, and each morning I sat at the desk with a notebook, pen, and a cup of green tea, and using Julia Cameron's excellent book about unblocking creativity called The Artist's Way as a guide, wrote my way through a couple of notebooks, worked on some of my 'issues', and drank my way through many boxes of green tea.

In that book, Cameron writes that creativity comes from God. In one part, she asks you to examine your ideas about God because, whether we are religious or not, we have all internalised certain ideas about God which can have profound psychological effects. In terms of the book, which is about unblocking creativity, she asks us to think about how we might view God, and our creativity that comes from Him, as abundant or limited, joyful or joyless, and rewarding or punitive.

At the point I was working through these things I wasn't even considering becoming a Muslim. I just wanted to think those things through because I wanted to learn how to be more open and to let my creativity flow more easily. (Still working on that!) I was blessed with a whole bunch of insights during this time. I think that that time spent sipping green tea and working through my ideas about God and religion opened me up and prepared me so that when the path to Islam presented itself to me, I was ready to take it. So green tea is part of the story of how I became a Muslim.

There are also many health benefits of garlic. Garlic is a member of the lily family, as is sometimes called "the stinking rose" due to the combination of its pungent odour and health benefits! Garlic contains a number of sulfur-containing compounds, including thiosulfonates, sulfoxides, and dithiins. Garlic can help maintain good cardiovascular health. Much modern research has focused on garlic's ability to lower cholesterol and blood pressure as well as offering protection against strokes and heart disease. Garlic has also been show to help blood clotting. It has antibacterial effects that can help fight infections, and is well known for its ability to reduce the incidence of catching cold, or reducing the severity of a cold.

Garlic's mucous reducing abilities are particularly attractive to me because in Australia, I am afflicted with allergies that leave my nose completely blocked up most of the year. One of my sisters wrote recently in her blog about how she adds garlic to nearly all of her one year old's food, and he got through the flu season with only a minor cold that lasted two days. I also read in my breastfeeding book, The Nursing Mother's Companion, that babies like the taste of garlic in breastmilk.

I worked with a friend a year or so ago who was an avid fan of garlic. She got me into the habit of eating one clove of raw garlic every day. I crush/chop the garlic, then put it on a spoon and swallow it with water, like little pills. I did this daily for a few months, and I felt great! No one ever told me that I had garlic breath! (And yes, there were days when I thought I smelt like garlic I would breathe on a coworker, friend, or my husband and asked, 'Do I have garlic breath?' to thankfully receive a reply of 'No!') When I became pregnant, though, I couldn't stomach a clove of raw garlic anymore, so I got out of the habit. But to get back in the habit of garlic, I recently bought a bag of organic garlic from E-mart that is super potent!

So a little goal I have set for myself in terms of my health is to drink at least one cup of green tea per day, and take one clove of garlic. I started about a week ago and it is going well (read: I did it most days). I think this is a better resolution in terms of improving my health than saying to myself, 'Don't eat cookies ever again'. It's a simple, measurable, positive action.

A little personal update . . .

2009-09-04T23:21:00.003+09:00

Bad news . . .
1. House is complete disaster. Stuff everywhere.

2. Baby's body clock completely switched around. Stay up all night. Sleep all day. Mama feels sorry for self.

3. Behind on Ramadan reading and blogging. Must try harder!

Good news . . .
1. First smile seen during solid meal. Oatmeal cereal a winner!

2. Husband received award of recognition at World Taekwondo Leaders Forum.

3. Success at increasing daily vegetable intake. (Still eating cookies, but oh well . . .)

4. Move imminent! 4 weeks left . . .

5. Cooler weather.

6. Baby's joy at being on the move.

Oh, baby's awake. Gotta go.

K and his peeps

2009-09-02T03:37:00.004+09:00

The gentle hard work of mothering

2009-09-01T01:52:00.004+09:00

My baby has started eating some solids (an upcoming post!) and I've been pumping a little bit of breast milk every couple of days to mix in with it, and for him to drink from a sippy cup. Pumping is a pain in the butt! I hate having to wash and boil the pump parts, and then sit there and pump . . . massaging my boob or looking at photos of baby on the computer or trying to think of how much I love him to help the letdown happen . . .

I said to my husband, "This pumping is hard work. Not crazy hard work, but hard work . . ."

He laughed and said, "Then what? Gentle hard work?"

I think that's what the work of mothering is like . . . none of it is hard work, as such, but it is such hard work. One more nappy change. One more time you have to find the dummy. One more load of washing to be hung up to dry. One more time you have to clean up the toys. One more time you have to soothe a fussing baby. One more time you have to go sit in the chair and feed baby. One more time you have to do some gentle hard work.

And then there's the reward: one more little smile, one more time baby wraps his chubby little fingers around yours, one more kiss on his smooth little forehead, one more time he snuggles in you arms . . .

Milestone: Sitting up!

2009-08-22T11:23:00.005+09:00

He's been able to sit up for short periods for ages, but a couple of weeks ago we sat him on the bed and took some pictures. I think this photo is just sooooo cute!! What a clever boy!

Surah 1, Al-Fatiha

2009-08-22T10:48:00.005+09:00

I started reading the Qur'an for Ramadan today, 1 juz per day. Actually, today I wasn't paying attention to the pagination and I got carried away and read part way into juz 2!

I thought I wold share the first surah (chapter) of the Qur'an today. It's Arabic name is 'Al-Fatiha' (or Al-Fatihat) which is translated as 'The Opening'. It is a short surah of 7 verses. This is the surah recited most often by Muslims because it must be recited in each unit (rakah) of ritual prayer (salat). There are 17 compulsory rakah per day: 2 in the pre-dawn prayer, 4 in the mid-day prayer, 4 in the mid-afternoon prayer, 3 in the twilight prayer, 4 in the night time prayer. So we recite this surah at least 17 times per day.

In this surah, we act in the name of God and reflect on His Nature, praise Him for His creation and care, recall that we will stand before Him in judgement, offer Him worship and ask for guidance, and ask to be shown the straight path towards Him.

1. In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.

2. Praise be to Allah, the Cherisher and Sustainer of the Worlds:

3. Most Gracious, Most Merciful;

4. Master of the Day of Judgment.

5. Thee do we worship, and Thine aid we seek.

6. Show us the straight way,

7. The way of those on whom Thou has bestowed Thy Grace, those whose (portion) is not wrath. And who go not astray.

(Translation by Yusuf Ali)

You can listen to a recitation of Al-Fatiha in Arabic by a little boy here. (I don't know how to embed You Tube videos into my blog post). The video is only 1 min 29 seconds, and the recitation starts at about 37 seconds.

Ramadan Mubarik!

2009-08-22T10:17:00.002+09:00

Ramadan for the Islamic year 1430 started today!

This is only my fourth Ramadan since I became a Muslim, and I've only fasted for the first two of them. I was pregnant during Ramadan last year so didn't fast. Mothers are exempt from fasting during pregnancy and breastfeeding if they think the fast could harm either themeselves, or the child. The main issue with fasting and breastfeeding, I think, is hydration. Muslim fasting means refraining from food and drink, including water. I don't think the risk of dehydration on a day to day basis for me or baby is too great (I can "super hydrate" at night by drinking lots of water), but I'm worried that repeatedly getting a little dehydrated each day for a month (I mean, there's no denying one feels quite thirsty by the end of the day!) might have some long term negative consequences for my milk supply. Up until this point, baby has been exclusively breastfed. He's going to have his first solid feed today, but he will still be getting the majority of his nutrition from breastmilk in the immediate future. We are planning on breastfeeding for quite a while longer yet, so I need to do all I can to maintain a good milk supply.

I can make up for the missed fast. I checked this out online and it seems there's not total agreement about how to make up the days, and if I understand it correctly, I think it depends on why you chose to fast (fear for your own health or fear for your baby's health). One option is to make it up by doing the equivalent number of days fasting later. I read some things saying this is not necessary because it can be impractical for mums. If you are pregnant then breastfeeding for several years, you'd have so many days of fasting to make up! Another way to make up for the missed fast is to provide food for a poor person. That is what I'll do.

I have to be grateful that I don't have to fast, because being able to not fast is a mercy from God out of concern for my health and well being. But I do feel a bit . . . wistful . . . at not fasting. Before I experienced it, I thought fasting was just a burden and a punitive test from God. But having done it, I now know that it is not so. It's really a gift. As the months of Ramadan I fasted went by, I found myself slowing down, getting less distracted by the minutiae, able to detach and look for the essence of things more completely. It definitely felt like a blessing.

So even though I'm not fasting officially, I've decided to do a mini-fast each day, from the time of Fajr (pre dawn prayer) to Zuhr (mid-day prayer). I'll spend a lot of that time asleep anyway! But I hope it will help me keep in touch with what it means to fast, why I want to do it and want to live my life as a Muslim, and take me a few steps closer to learning the truth of my life.

** You can read a short kellymom (breastfeeding website) article about religious fasting here.

Things to do first

2009-08-21T17:18:00.004+09:00

I've been researching more about going back to Australia with my husband. Here are the paperwork-y things that are recommended as a top priority for a new migrant to Australia!

1. Get a tax file number. This is necessary in order to earn money in Australia. You can apply straight away via an online application, and it takes a couple of days for it to be processed.

2. Register with Medicare, Australia's public health care system. I'm not sure why, but you have to wait at least 7 days after arriving before you can apply to Medicare. If you need to go to the doctor in the interim, they will give you a temporary Medicare number. You have to bring your passport with you when you apply.

3. Open a bank account. This should be done, using your passport as ID, within 6 weeks of arrival. More than 6 weeks after arrival, additional ID will be required, but a new migrant might not have those forms of ID yet.

4. Register with Centrelink, Australia's agency that deals with benefits for those in need. As a general rule, new migrants are not eligible for Centrelink benefits (such as unemployment) for a period of 2 years from arrival, but you should register there anywhere and check out your options. You can use their job search facilities and may be eligible for some assistance depending on your individual situation.

5. Register for English classes. English languages courses for new arrivals in Australia are provided under the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP). As a new resident, you may be entitled to receive free English language tuition of up to 510 hours. Register as soon as possible or you could lose your entitlement. My husband can already speak, read, and write English proficiently, so he won't need to do this.

6. Enrol your children in school. School is compulsory for all children aged between 5 and 15 years. Our baby will only be 7.5 months old when we arrive, so we don't have to worry about this one either!

7. Apply for a driver's licence via your state agency. In Victoria, you can use your license from another country (in English, or with an official translation) for three months from your arrival. To obtain Victorian driver licence (full or probationary) you need to make an appointment to undertake a road law knowledge test, hazard perception test (HPT) eyesight test and a driving assessment (with some exceptions) at a VicRoads Customer Service Centre. You must complete and pass the road law knowledge test and hazard perception test before you attempt the driving assessment.

Signs of progress

2009-08-18T09:42:00.003+09:00

The photo above was taken almost two weeks ago during a day time nap. Baby woke up, but rolled over onto his side, and fell asleep again. Self soothing behavior observed, CHECK! Cute new sleeping position, CHECK! Well rested baby, CHECK! Excited and hopeful mummy, CHECK!

There have actually been several occasions in his life when he's put himself back to sleep after waking up during a day time nap. I suppose he must have done it at night too, and I just didn't know it. But after seeing that he rolled over onto his side and went back to sleep that first time, he's done it several times since, in both the day AND the night. And a couple of times when he woke up at night, I was able to just put him on his side, and pat his back for a few minutes until he fell asleep.

This is a really exciting new development!

6 months old

2009-08-18T09:21:00.004+09:00

The self-discipline of motherhood

2009-08-11T03:38:00.003+09:00

1. Not scratching your arm while holding baby as he falls asleep even though it is ITCHING YOU TO HELL and you feel like you'd rather gnaw it off than experience the itch any longer.

2. Agreeing to get up at 6.30am to go somewhere even though you know you'll be up with baby till late (probably after 3.00am . . . )

3. Smiling and launching into a cheerful rendition of 'Five Little Ducks' during nappy change time to try and keep baby semi-still, while wishing he'd just STOP MOVING FOR FIVE SECONDS IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK????

4. Being okay with the fact that baby was finally in bed at 3:30am.

5. Blogging at 3.45am because that is when you have time for it.

Hidden scars, hidden strength

2009-08-09T00:28:00.005+09:00

I've been thinking about the physical challenges and the marks left on our bodies by our pregnancy and birth experiences -- stretch marks on our breasts and bellies, scars from episiotomies and tears, C-section scars, back pain, pubic pain, swollen and sore breasts, cracked nipples, heartburn, headaches, sleep deprivation, bodies that are a different shape even if the same weight as pre-pregnancy . . .

It's a lot for our bodies to go through, to bear. We talk about it amongst ourselves, with certain like minded friends, but these things are usually not a topic of general conversation or general (Western) cultural acceptance. It's hardly acceptable to mention a perineal tear when an acquaintance on the street asks how the birth went! For the most part, the physical challenges of pregnancy and birth and their permanent marks on our bodies are hidden, silent, and only fleetingly acknowledged.

In hardboiled detective fiction, and its modern day counterpart the blockbuster action movie, the lead character's heroism is, at least in part, symbolised by the physical toll it takes on his or her body. Think of any action hero: by the end of the movie they are dirty, dishevelled, bloody, and usually toting one or more injuries. The injured body that keeps on going is a cultural symbol of heroism, resilience, and strength.

The marks pregnancy and birth leave upon our bodies are symbols of our strength and resilience, and mark us as heroines in a line of heroines extending back to the beginning of (wo)mankind. Just as our scars are hidden from view, women's - especially mothers' - strength and power is so often overlooked. The scars from our pregnancy and birth experiences can be painful, and that pain should be acknowledged, but we should also remember they are signs of a hidden strength that fuels us to stand up clear-eyed and naked and say 'I am ready' when it is time for baby to be born . . . and that is the power to change the world.

Ramadan is approaching

2009-08-08T01:23:00.004+09:00

So far I've been writing a lot about being a mama but not much about being a Muslim. Ramadan is coming, which is a good time to redress the balance and focus more on spiritual issues.

Fasting during Ramadan is one of the five pillars of Islam - the five basic duties of a Muslim. It is prescribed for us in the Qur'an:

The month of Ramazan is that in which the Quran was revealed, a guidance to men and clear proofs of the guidance and the distinction; therefore whoever of you is present in the month, he shall fast therein, and whoever is sick or upon a journey, then (he shall fast) a (like) number of other days; Allah desires ease for you, and He does not desire for you difficulty, and (He desires) that you should complete the number and that you should exalt the greatness of Allah for His having guided you and that you may give thanks.

Qur'an 2:185 (translation by Shakir)

Sawm is the actual word for fasting; Ramadan is the name of the ninth month in the Islamic calendar, the month prescribed for fasting. The month begins the night after the new moon, when the first sliver of the waxing moon can be seen. This year, Ramadan will begin around August 22nd (it depends on when the moon is sighted). Ramadan lasts 29 or 30 days, depending on the moon.

I did not fast last year because I was pregnant, and I will not be fasting this year because I am breastfeeding (another blog post). Last year when I did not fast, I felt a little sad, like I was missing out on something.

Another thing recommended for Muslims during Ramadan is reading the Qur'an the whole way through. It is conveniently divided into 30 approximately equal parts (juz) to help us do this! We can read 1 juz each day. I did this last year for the first time (although I didn't read a juz a day . . . some days I missed out and made up for it later). It was cool. It is my goal to do it again this year, and my sub-goal is to blog about some cool phrase, verses, or chapter I read ten times during the month.

Stackable cups

2009-08-05T00:23:00.003+09:00

Baby loves his stackable cups! These have been his favourite toy for a few weeks now. He is so cute and busy when he plays with them. They're a good toy for a baby just learning to coordinate himself because when one cup rolls away, there are plenty more right there! I've been stacking them up and letting him knock them over, with a big "Oh! Fall down!" flourish, but he doesn't really enjoy that game yet. He just likes pulling the cups out of the stakc, holding them and of course, putting them in his mouth.

Blessings in disguise

2009-08-04T03:49:00.002+09:00

Another late night with baby. He's just gone down to bed.

He wants a lot of attention when he's awake at night. My plan is always to blog and shop on Gmarket and fun internet stuff like that while he lies on his mat. But most nights, he's not a self-entertainer. I end up holding him, or rocking him in his chair, walking with him around the kitchen (the kitchen is the magic room that can always calm him) or lying with him. I don't really get to use the computer much.

Tonight I was thinking about how much I actually hold him during these night time awakenings, how many kisses and cuddles he gets, how many times I've soothed him, how many times I've made him smile, and how eventually, when he finally succumbs to sleep, I'm right there with him. Would he get that much attention from me if he was awake during the day? Would I feel as entitled to just sit around and be with him?

I've always known the challenge of these night awakenings were given to me by God, but tonight I saw it as a gift. My sweet baby in my arms for hours. God knows best. Baby and I must both need this.

I've learned so much about him during these long, sometimes heartbreaking, nights. Tonight I was thinking back to when he was younger and we didn't know each other so well . . . how upset we could make each other. I was filled with tenderness for the both of us, struggling in our own ways. I love my son so much and despite the inconvenience of being constantly tired it is a blessing, blessing, blessing to know him. I'm humbled by the magnificent and generous gift of being his mother . . . at all times of the day and night.

It is so late it is time for fajr (the pre-dawn prayer). I will pray and then go to bed.

Thanks, and how I came to this blog

2009-08-01T22:54:00.003+09:00

I would just like to say thank you to everyone for your comments on my blog! I love to read them! I feels great to know that people are reading and enjoying my blog.

It is my dream to be 'a writer'. I started this blog because I hope that it will lead me towards that goal. I mean, I am already a writer, just writing this blog! But I would love to be a professional writer, and hope it will open up possibilities for me in terms of what kind of writing and how it would get 'out there' to the people. I have no expectations or ideas about how that might happen. I am just following an idea I read in a book once: do what you love and the money will follow.

I have been writing for a long time, since my mid teens. I have written four novels. The first two I wrote when I was in high school, and were read by my sisters. The last two I wrote here in Korea and have been read by no one.

The first one is quite embarrassing. It was about a girl called Jo who was very pretty and good at netball, had a polka-dot wallpapered bedroom (!), and spent at least part of nearly every page kissing her boyfriend. (Teenage hormones - mine and hers.) She had an evil cousin who was jealous of Jo's relationship with her boyfriend, and the cousin took her revenge by teaming up with a couple of her cronies and bashing up Jo behind the bike sheds at school. I can't really remember what happened at the end -- I think it may have culminated with a thrilling, edge-of-your-seat game of netball. I'm sure Jo kissed her boyfriend to celebrate the inevitable victory, and the cousin had to begrudgingly accept that Jo was the better woman.

The second one was better, I think, but for some reason (I thought it was cool) I gave the main character the stupid nickname of Duck. Duck was in high school and was coping with the emotional fallout after her boyfriend Toby had killed himself. I can't actually remember what the plot of the story was, but I know it was interspersed with flashbacks about Toby. Vague memories of a scene in an ice cream shop with a new love interest are coming back to me now. It seems all my books have a scene of violence in them. (Hello therapist!) In this book, I think Duck's mother was a psycho and there was a scene where the mother beat her up. I remember there was one scene in which Duck was at the ocean in winter, thinking about Toby and watching a seagull.

The third book was probably the most disastrous of them all because I couldn't settle on a plot before hand so I just decided to start writing and see what happened. I guess that is a good experiment, so I shouldn't say it was disastrous. But I kept getting new ideas and changing my mind about things and I ended up with more than 200 pages of random scenes, and it was pretty impossible to shape into anything coherent. I read somewhere that first novels tend to be somewhat autobiographical and self-indulgent, and that is a good description of this book. I was about a young woman in her twenties who came to Korea. I don't think it was a bad idea to base the setting of the book on my own experience, but the writing ended up being a way for me to deal with some of my experiences here and back at home, and all the resultant psychological complexes. It turned out to be a very therapeutic experience, but was something of a literary disaster.

The fourth book I just rediscovered in a folder in our bookshelf here during the clean up/clear out. It is better than the third because it has an actual plot. It is about a family of women - an older woman (I can't remember her name), her two daughters Janet and Someone (I can't remember her name either), and Someone's adult daughter Kate. The background is: the older woman's husband left when the girls were little. Someone was always very flaky, and Janet was always very responsible. Someone got pregnant when she was about fifteen, had the baby Kate, and then basically took off. The older woman and Janet raised Kate. Janet had a very responsible life, got married, had a baby, and now has her own interior design business (which is heavily in debt). Kate has just graduated university and is wondering who she is and what she is going to do with her life. Someone has been backpacking around the world this whole time, having short term jobs and short term relationships. The novel begins when Someone just shows up unannounced, wanting to stay a while. Soon after, the older woman finds out she is dying of cancer. Responsible Janet is the only one who knows that. The older woman's dying wish is to take a road trip to see Uluru, so the four of them, plus Janet's five year old son, take off in a giant caravan called Bertha and the story is about what happens on the way to Uluru. All their jagged edges rub against one another and they have to learn about each other and themselves in order to repair their relationships.

I actually like the idea of this fourth book and when I started it, I wanted it to be poignant, but also sort of fun and light. But when I wrote it, I felt that it ended up very stodgy, very heavy, and I wasn't sure anyone would enjoy it. Anyway, I am going to read that again, I think, and see what my impression is now.

At university I did a double degree, a Bachelor of Science and a Bachelor of Arts. In Australia, we have an optional undergraduate year called Honours. The standard is higher than the regular undergraduate courses, but lower than a Masters. We were in class together with the Masters students, but the assessments were slightly different.

In my Honours year for Science, I worked in a lab, did a research project, and wrote a thesis. The title of my thesis was (more or less) Analysis of the RGD sequence in the transferrin receptor and attempt to identify insect transferrin. Enough said!

Doing Honours in Arts was one of the best decisions I have made. I absolutely loved it. My thesis title was Dissecting Detective, Vindicating Victim: The Detective Fiction of Patricia Cornwell. It started off with a general discussion about the feminist reworking of detective fiction, and then I analysed Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta novels and argued that the books challenged some of the tropes of conventional detective fiction through their emphasis on the importance of the victims' bodies and their insistence that the dead body must speak, and the detective must listen, in order for the crime to be solved.

I also did a mountain of personal journaling in notebooks. And I mean a mountain. I just found a whole stack of notebooks in my wardrobe the other day. This was great because it helped we work through a lot of stuff, but I stopped doing it because I began to feel like it was actually keeping me trapped in the same circles of thought and stopping me from moving forward.

A few years ago I started a blog on Live Journal. I still have it. At first it was public and I was writing about myself, and my feelings, but those things were a) too honest and b) too raw for me to share with others. I had a bad experience where someone read things and then brought them up with me in a way I felt was pretty insensitive and inapporpriate. Although really it was my fault because I should have been more discreet to begin with. That journal is now 'for friends only'.

That experience with my Live Journal blog has shaped this blog because although I don't mind revealing some things about myself, I don't intend to really go into a lot of details about my family. It is okay to write some things, and I don't mind putting a photo every now and then, but I am going to try and leave out a lot of identifying information. That is why I don't write their names here. I'm consciously keeping this as my 'public' writing. I really want to explore how some of the themes in my life - motherhood, religion, race, gender - intersect. I hope it will be interesting reading for others. It has already opened me up in a lot of ways.

Migration 101

2009-07-31T01:49:00.004+09:00

My husband was granted his visa for permanent residence in Australia earlier this year, so it is time for us to move on. I have been living in Korea for seven years. It has been a great experience and I'm sure I won't appreciate it fully until I have been away from here for a while. I'm so grateful that I've been here. But I am ready to leave. Most of the time I can't believe that I'm really going to leave. It's one of those things you talk about but doesn't seem real. Every now and again it hits me - we're really leaving! - and my stomach turns over. Whether it's turning over with fear or excitement, I am not really sure.

So. My husband is going to be a migrant and that will bring a whole host of challenges and opportunities. I don't know what to expect.

For me, it shouldn't be such a big deal, because I'm Australian. But I feel like half a migrant going back there. I've been away so long, when hubby asks me things about it (like the cost of groceries and fuel, or how to get a home loan for example) I really have no idea! I have changed so much during my time in Korea and I do feel like a different woman is going back there compared to the one who left all those years ago. I'm expecting a bit of reverse culture shock, but hopefully once I'm there I will get back into the swing of things pretty quickly.

We have bought our tickets and will depart on October 1. That is only 9 weeks away! We have started packing. It is way more difficult than I anticipated. I thought I would just gaily toss things into boxes and it would be done in a few hours. No. It's surprisingly slow. We have to figure out what we don't need and can send by sea mail now, what we do need but can do without and send by sea mail now, what we need now but won't need when we get there and can send by sea mail just before we leave, what we need now and will need when we get there but can do without for a couple of weeks so will send by air mail close to our departure date, and what we need now and will need immediately when we get there and have to pack in our baggage.

It's not quite as complicated as it sounds. My brother in law and his wife are going to move into the apartment and take all the furniture and appliances, so we don't have to worry about clearing out the house. We will probably try and sell the baby's cot, but that is all. (I'm in two minds about selling the cot. It is heavy but I have a sentimental attachment to it because a) it is my first baby's first bed and b) it was a gift, and also it smaller than a regular cot so it would be a good bed to have in our room for our next baby.)

So for hubby and I, it's just a matter of sorting clothes and personal items. Most of the items can just go now - we can do without them. I've packed up and sent all my books, CDs, DVDs, souvenirs, and random stuff. I've packed and sent all my heavy winter clothes, and clothes that I can't wear now because they don't fit or aren't appropriate for breastfeeding, and some shoes. I will go through my wardrobe again and try to cull some more. My plan is to keep a holiday amount of clothes with me, that can fit into my big backpack when we leave.

The baby's things are a bit more complicated because some of them fall into the category of needing them now and needing them immediately. As he grows out of clothes I will pack them away and send them. We are going to stay at my Mum and Dad's house first. They have a cot that the baby will sleep in, and bedding for it, so I will just send his bedding right before we leave. I'm going to send his cloth nappies a couple of weeks before we leave, and we'll just use disposables. That way I won't have to worry about washing and drying nappies in the last few days before we leave, which will undoubtedly be chaotic. Even if the nappies have already arrived at my Mum and Dads, I will probably use disposables for a few days until we get settled in.

As far as his toys go, I will probably keep them here until the last minute, and take as many with us as we can fit in our bags. I've made a conscious effort not to buy too many toys or any toys that are particularly big. The toys that won't fit, I'll send by air mail. My parents have lots of toys at their place, so there will be lots of new and interesting things for him to play with, but I want to take some of his familiar toys as well.

The only thing I'm not sure what I'll do with yet is his vibrating rocking chair. This is really useful because I strap him into it if I need to do something (like take a shower). He really likes playing in it. Also, it's recently become a really useful tool in getting him off to sleep. We still have the original box so I will get that out and check how big it is. If it is too big or heavy for us to take with us on the plane, I will probably send it early and do without it here. I think I'd rather have it when we get there so that if he is freaked out by the move, it will be something comfortingly familiar for him.

It is really exciting, but also daunting. I keep telling my son, 'You are a little Australian boy. And soon we are going to go in an airplane, and you are going to start your life in Australia.'

To stroll or not to stroll . . .

2009-07-28T04:01:00.003+09:00

So far, we don't have a stroller. I've been wearing baby everywhere I go. I have two different carriers: a Moby wrap, and a ring sling. The ring sling was a gift from my sister (she made it). I like the way it looks and I have tried it several times, but I just can't seem to get the hang of getting the baby in there properly. When I see other people with their babies looking so cute in the sling, I really want to master mine. But every time I try it, the fabric is sort of loose and floppy and I feel safer with my arm wrapped around him for extra security. I still like to use it sometimes but only if I am going somewhere close to the house, like going to the shop to get some milk or something like that.

The Moby wrap I bought. It is awesome. This is what I've been using pretty much every day since he was born to carry him around town. The Moby looks kind of complicated to put on, but I found it pretty easy to follow the instructions that come with it. It goes over two shoulders and wraps around your hips, so the weight is distributed evenly, and is really comfortable once the baby is in it. If the tension is right, I can barely feel the more than 8kg weight of my son at all. (I have found if I wrap it too tight, too much of the weight pulls on my shoulders, and if I wrap it too loosely, too much of the weight goes on my hips. It's trial and error to figure out the right tension, but not too difficult.) Baby LOVES riding around in it. He kicks and smiles with excitement every time he sees me get it out. There's a whole bunch of different ways you can tie it/put the baby in it. So far, I've worn him facing me with his legs tucked inside (really cosy when he was a newborn in winter) and these days, facing me with his legs hanging out. The fact that it is not structured is good for traveling around on buses and the subway. He likes to stand up on my lap and look out of the window when we travel on the bus, and with the wrap there's room for him to do so, while still being strapped to me securely. He does tend to shift a bit in it though, after that. He's never quite in the same position he was before we got on the bus!

Anyway, people keep asking me about a stroller. I'm just talking about an umbrella stroller, not anything fancy like a jogging stroller. It is the middle of summer and gets pretty toasty warm for the two of us inside the wrap. I usually have a nice circle of sweat on my clothes when I take him out of it after walking around for a while. Obviously, this is only a temporary issue, easily cured by cooler weather! But it does raise the issue of getting a stroller, because it might be cooler for the both of us.

Not only the weather though. People just keep asking me if I'm going to get a stroller! I guess a stroller is considered a baby essential. It's not like I have anything against strollers, in particular. I don't think a stroller is very practical for me at this point. Most of the time when I go out, it is without my husband. We have stairs outside our apartment that I would have to carry the stroller up/down. I also think it's easier to have the baby in the wrap for traveling on the bus. Traveling on the subway with a stroller would be easier than traveling on the bus, I imagine, but I usually take the bus if I can.

Another reason I'm not sure about a stroller -- I'm just not sure I'm ready to stop having baby so close to me yet! I love having him up close. I can see him easily. We can make eye contact. Having his body so close to mine, it's easy to pick up on when he's feeling more excited, or calm, or sleepy. I can see what he is looking at and talk to him about it. He's almost at face level, so he's included in conversations with other people. Having in the wrap covers up my post-partum tummy (a benefit not to scoffed at!) Basically, I just love having him in the wrap. I can dip my head and give him a little kiss any time I feel like it.

Despite all that, I can see the benefits of a stroller. As he gets older, moving him to a stroller is kind of natural progression, I think. But when do I want to do that?

In the discussion about weaning in The Baby Book, Dr. Sears says that weaning "is not a negative term. Weaning does not mean a loss or detachment from a relationship, but rather a passage from one relationship to another . . . In ancient writings the word 'wean' means 'to ripen' - like fruit nourished to readiness, its time to leave the vine. When a child was weaned it was a festive occasion, and not because of what you may think - "Now I can finally get away from this kid . . ." Weaning was a joyous occasion because a weaned child was valued as a fulfilled child; a child was so filled with the basic tools of the earlier stages of development that she graduated to take on the next stage of development more independently."

(I love this holistic description of weaning, which shows it is a process not related only to the cessation of breastfeeding but to parenting in general, and the way it talks about a baby's passage to independence.)

I feel like moving baby from the carrier to a stroller is a kind of weaning -- maybe for me more than him! I'm not ready to stretch the connection and let him be that far away from me yet. I know it's not really a big deal whether he is in a stroller or I wear him in the wrap, but I do think there are developmental benefits to babywearing and I wouldn't like to cut those short prematurely. Of course, it's not an either/or situation as well. I could alternate between them depending on the situation.

Basically I find myself feeling that I should get a stroller, but not being whole heartedly committed to the idea. I need to do some research though. We are moving to Australia soon, and I am pretty sure it will be cheaper to buy a stroller here. I know a few people who have Maclaren strollers, and say they are really good. I looked for them on Gmarket and they are not super expensive, but not super cheap either. I also know several people who bought cheap strollers and are satisfied with them as well. I have to think about it a bit more, decide what to get, and get prepared to give baby -- and me -- a little taste of indpendence as we stroll around town.

The Baby Book, by Dr. Sears

2009-07-27T17:48:00.003+09:00

I haven't bought many baby books. I bought The Baby Book a couple of months ago. It is really long - more than 750 pages. The subtitle is: Everything you need to know about your baby from birth until age two. While it's impossibe for a book to really tell you everything you need to know, I think it does a pretty good job of fulfilling that promise.

The book is divided into five parts. Part I is called 'Getting Started' and includes a chapter devoted to explaining attachment parenting, and chapters about preparing for birth and baby, and getting started with a new baby.

Part II is called 'Infant Feeding and Nutrition' and discusses breastfeeding and bottlefeeding, introducing solid foods, feeding a toddler, and being your family's nutritionist.

Part III is called 'Contemporary Parenting' and discusses babywearing, nighttime parenting (ie sleep!), working and parenting, parenting a fussy baby. This is also some discussion of special situations such as parenting an adopted baby, a baby with Down's Syndrome, or twins.

Part IV is called 'Infant Development and Behaviour'. It has chapters devoted to baby's development from 0-6 months, 7-12 months, and 12-24 months. There is a chapter about toddler behavior, and one about toilet training.

Part V is called 'Keeping Your Baby Safe and Healthy' and include information about babyproofing, immunisations, SIDS, common medical concerns, and first aid.

There are two things I liked about this book. The first is, it is an all around discussion of birth, babies, and parenting - part medical, part psychological, part social. Also, it does have information regarding all ages up to two years, including several chapter devoted exclusively to toddler issues.

I really enjoyed the chapter about the infant's development from 0-6 months (my baby is only 5 months old so I haven't needed to read beyond that yet.) It talks about the developmental milestones. It also suggests games and toys your baby might enjoy. This helped me because I was a bit lost in trying to figure out what I should do with my son when he was awake! It also includes information about what babies like to look at, tips for talking to your baby, posture tips for stimulating play, helping your baby to be a good communicator, and decoding baby's social signals. Some of those topics are just dot points in a box, but I found all that stuff really useful.

The second thing is, it's very reasonable, and makes allowances for the fact that every family is different and that not everyone is going to do things exactly the same way. I really wondered what this book would be like before I read it, because in a lot of discussions of attachment parenting issues I had come across in various forums and websites around the internet, so many of the adherents of attachment parenting a) were zealots with a slavish devotion to doing exactly what Dr. Sears says and b) more or less judged anyone not practicing attachment parenting as not really loving their baby properly. (I'm not saying everyone who is into attachment parenting is like that, I'm just saying I came across that attitude a lot.)

Anyway, the book itself is very reasonable. In the first chapter of the book, Dr. Sears basically outlines what attachment parenting is: a style of parenting that aims to foster a strong emotional attachment between parents and baby. He argues this strong emotional attachment is the foundation that helps children become smarter, healthier, more sensitive, more empathetic, easier to discipline, and more bonded to people than things. Additionally, he believes attachment parenting helps parents to become more confident, find parenting easier, and enjoy parenting more.

He presents the 'seven baby B's' of attachment parenting:

1. Birth bonding - connect with your baby early

2. Belief in your baby's cries - read and respond to your baby's cues

3. Breastfeed your baby

4. Babywearing - carry your baby a lot

5. Bedding close to baby

6. Balance and boundaries - being appropriately responsive

7. Beware of baby trainers.

The reason I think this book is very reasonable is because he does understand that parents may follow each of the seven B's to varying degrees, while all remaining committed to attachment parenting. He says the 'seven B's' will give you a head start in developing a close attachment with your baby. The main idea this is is obvious is with 'bedding close to baby'. Obviously not everyone co-sleeps (what the book calls 'sharing sleep'), and although he personally believes that is best, he really accepts that others may not do that, and even that not co-sleeping may help others to be better attachment-style parents than they would have been if they had co-slept.

The main thing about attachment parenting (I think) is the idea of being responsive to your baby, and more than that, of parents and baby being mutally responsive. Whether you choose to co-sleep or not, wear your baby a lot or not, breastfeed or bottle feed, strong parent-child attachments can still be fostered. It just depends on how much time and effort you spend in trying to lovingly read, understand, and respond to your baby.

If you are really not into the ideas of attachment parenting at all, I would probably skip this book because although Dr. Sears is flexible in his ideas about how people might practice attachment parenting, the non-medical advice in the book is all premised on the fact that those reading it are practicing attachment parenting. However, if you are interested in attachment parenting but not totally sure, and want to get some useful information about how to care for a baby into the bargain, I think this book is a good place to start. And if you want a comprehensive book with a lot of useful information about babies from birth to two years, then I would recommend this book.

I ordered it online from What the Book? and it was somewhere in the range of 30,000 won.

K has a new cousin!

2009-07-26T15:45:00.005+09:00

My sister gave birth to her baby yesterday, masha'allah! She was due on August 5th, but -- lucky her! -- baby decided to come a little bit early. I haven't heard the details of her birth yet, but she woke up around 8am and knew she was in labour, and then her son was born at 4:30pm. My mum texted us a photo of the baby and he looks so precious; he has blonde hair just like his dad. Oooh, I can't wait till we get to Australia and I can scoop him up and give him a cuddle.

My parents have seven grandchildren now - six grandsons, and one granddaughter! Their ages are 7, 5, turning 3 this week, 1, 6 months, 5 months, 1 day (squeee!!!). Another one of my sisters is due to give birth in September. It will be interesting to see if she has another boy for the bunch, or a little girl cousin friend for my niece. (Personally, I think she's going to have another boy!) Hopefully we will all be together at Christmas this year and we can line all the cousins up for a photo.

I'm not sure if there's something special Muslims are supposed to say at the birth of a baby. My simple prayer is that God will bless this new little one and keep him safe. Ameen.

Acknowledgement

2009-07-25T00:14:00.003+09:00

Recently I was chatting with one of my sisters online. We were talking about baby's sleep habits (*rolls eyes*) and she said to me, 'You are doing it hard'.

It felt so good to have somebody acknowledge that. I need everybody's encouraging comments, suggestions for what to try, and reminders that this will pass. But it felt so good to have someone just sit with me in acceptance of the situation for a moment, and to feel someone had noticed and acknowledged what I am going through.

Something similar happened after I gave birth. I felt really flat and disappointed in myself that I had gotten so overwhelmed by the experience and found it so much harder than I anticipated. Everybody was congratulating me on the baby and how well I'd done to have a natural labour. Of course I needed and appreciated that (imagine how crap I would have felt without it!!!), but I felt that something - something about me - was being missed.

At my doctor's appointment about ten days after I had given birth, I started crying when the doctor said my stitches weren't healing well. She said, 'I know you didn't want an episiotomy, but you needed it because you had a difficult labour. Your baby's head wasn't in a good position.' It was the first time anyone had acknowledged that the labour had been difficult, that I had struggled. It was a very healing moment.

It feels really good to be acknowledged - accepted, and empathized with, and known. I think we all want to feel that somone has noticed us, has known our struggles and victories, has recognized our fragile and intimate selves.

So much of a mother's work is unacknowledged. A labour of love it may be, but it is also work. Work that flies under the radar because it is gentle, quiet, or still, or carried out when there is no one there to see.

In the Qur'an, God tells us that He knows everything that happens on the earth:

Allah, is He, than Whom there is no other god; Who knows (all things) both secret and open; He, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. (59:22)

With Him are the keys of the unseen, the treasures that none knoweth but He. He knoweth whatever there is on the earth and in the sea. Not a leaf doth fall but with His knowledge: there is not a grain in the darkness (or depths) of the earth, nor anything fresh or dry (green or withered), but is (inscribed) in a record clear (to those who can read). (6:59)

Verily Allah knows (all) the hidden things of the heavens and the earth: verily He has full knowledge of all that is in (men's) hearts. (35:48)

Acknowledgement from others feels so good. I appreciate my sister's comment so much. But we do labour alone so often in this earthly life, and as well as it not being possible for another to notice everything we do, constant acknowledgement of me is an unrealistic burden to place on another's shoulders. Acknowledgement from others, a cherished gift, is fleeting.

I try to remember, when I am feeling overworked, overwhelmed, unappreciated and unacknowledged by others that I am not alone. God knows everything that happens on the earth, and therefore knows each of us, and everything we do, intimately. I am not alone. I am not labouring without reward. I am constantly watched, known, loved, and valued for what I do by Him, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.

Restricting daytime sleep

2009-07-23T01:06:00.002+09:00

I did a bit of an experiment last week. My son has started falling asleep pretty predictably around the same time each night, but he keeps waking in the next hour or two. Sometimes he's been content to be resettled to sleep, but sometimes he is up and ready to keep those little eyes open for a few more hours!

I thought maybe the reason he was waking again after falling asleep was that he just wasn't tired enough and ready to sleep for the night. So I decided to cut short his day time naps at two hours. (He usually takes at least one three hour nap during the day.) I hoped that by doing this, he would be a more tired at night, and ready to just conk out and sleep.

It didn't work. Over the course of the week, he got increasingly cranky and needier when he was awake, and actually stopped falling asleep at the earlier time. We had late nights that were really hard because he was so grizzly. He was also harder to put down for naps during the day.

Cutting short his naps just made him overtired and did not improve his sleep. This is not something I will try again, and not something I would recommend to anyone else.

Sounds for Silence

2009-07-22T23:48:00.004+09:00

I received Sounds for Silence as a gift from a friend. It is a CD of five specially created tracks of environmental sounds that can help settle irritable babies and help babies sleep. There is also a track of white noise, and seven tracks by Mozart.

This was created by an Australian paediatrician, Dr. Harry Zehnwirth. In the booklet that comes with the CD, it says that babies can be comforted and soothed by sounds that mimic the noisy environment of the womb. Babies are most comforted by continuous, low pitched sounds.

The environmental sounds tracks have "been blended [and] layered . . . Selections of air and water sounds have been combined . . . The layering of several noises to include a variety of environmental and appliance sounds will give your baby auditory undulations to focus on. The sounds are further enhanced by incorporating maternal physiological sounds." The instructions say to figure out which track your baby responds best to, and then play that track on repeat when you want him or her to settle and/or sleep.

This CD has made a difference to the sleep situation in our house! My son's favourite track is the first one, called 'Kerpump'. You can see a physical response to the sounds. His whole body relaxes into my arms. He has started falling asleep pretty regularly at around the same time of night (YAY), but he keeps waking up one or two times in the next one to two hours and needs to be resettled. The Sounds for Silence CD hasn't been a magic bullet in terms of getting him to fall asleep -- although it has made a bit of a difference there too -- but it has made a huge difference in being able to resettle him more easily when he wakes up (I leave it playing while he sleeps). This is wonderful because when my son woke up again, he would freak out that he was awake and then would be up for hours. So being able to resettle him means he can have a pretty normal night's sleep.

Overall, I think this is a great product and definitely worth trying if your baby is very irritable or has trouble sleeping.

Baby likes to fly

2009-07-19T15:41:00.004+09:00

Baby likes it when we hold him up in the air so he can fly like an airplane. I sing a song I remember from the TV show Play School:

Up in the air I fly

Zoom zoom a-zoom a-zoom zoom

Up in the clear blue sky

Zoom zoom a-zoom a-zoom zoom

Zoom zoom zoom zoom a-zoom zoom a-zoom zoom

He likes the word zoom. The photo is from about a month ago.

Where were all the mothers?

2009-07-17T22:19:00.003+09:00

Women, women's bodies, and women's language were central themes of what I studied in my Enlgish major as part of my Bachelor of Arts degree. The other day I was thinking back over that, and it suddenly hit me that I don't remember any of what I studied being about mothers, or mothers' bodies. Maybe it wasn't on the curriculum because most of us were in our early twenties and motherhood wasn't on most of our agendas back then.

I remember I read one article by Elizabeth Grosz that talked about bodies in public spaces and how one constructs the other. Now I am a mother and carrying my baby, someone always gets up for me on the bus and lets me sit down. When I was pregnant, even hugely pregnant at the end, only sometimes would someone give up a seat for me. And a non-pregnant, non-baby carrying woman? No one would ever give up a seat for you. That's a pretty simplistic example, and I'm sure I can't remember the complexities and subtleties of Grosz's argument now, but it does demonstrate how mothers' bodies move through and inhabit public space differently to non-mothers' bodies.

It would be interesting to delve into this topic further . . . PhD project, perhaps?

Might as well face it, I'm addicted to junk

2009-07-14T23:22:00.006+09:00

I am on a major sugar binge at the moment.

Have been since baby was born. My post-partum belly is hunkering down and settling in for the long haul, I think. It will not be going anywhere in a hurry. I'm not sure I really care about being a bit fatter than I was before. But I'm not sure I don't care, either.

The main thing is my moods and energy levels. Being a mum is hard work - busy, constant, tiring. There's not as many opportunities for those little ways I used to treat myself. So a cookie, or cake, or chocolate bar (I love all the 'c' foods!) every now and then feels like a nice, easy way to say 'well done' to myself. It's yummy and gives me a nice little energy rush afterwards.

Later the sugar rush crashes to an end and I feel tired again, and cranky. Repeat the 'eat a little treat' routine . . . it's become a cycle.

I loooooove all those 'c' junk foods -- cookies, cake, chocolate, and chips. And coffee, sweetened to the max! Also ice cream (well, that starts with 'i', but who cares? I still love it!). Candy is one thing that doesn't toot my horn, though, thank goodness!

I will quote from one of my Live Journal posts from 2007 called 'A long meditation on caffeine and junk':

I'm feeling soooo . . . uuuurrrrrggggghhhh . . . right now. I lost my temper with someone at work today at snapped at her. I feel so bad. I hate it when lose my temper.(As an aside, I've noticed I feel worse when I lose my temper at other people than I do when I lose my temper at The Greatest Taekwondo Instructor in the World. Which I feel kind of ashamed about, because he is more important than others, so why do I care less about snapping at him? This just goes to proving my own theory that we often treat worst the ones we love the most.)

Anyway, I had drunk coffee earlier in the afternoon, prior to the temper-losing. I'm not making excuses for myself, but I really think coffee makes me more irritable, less patient, less kind. I guess that is no surprise considering the reported effects of caffeine . . . but when I read that stuff, I always think the bad effects of it come into play if you go the extreme and have
litres of coffee everyday (the it'll-never-happen-to-me syndrome!). Since I've reduced drinking coffee (the last time I had some before today was Thursday last week!) I've noticed on several occasions that drinking coffee makes me instantly more buzzed and irritable. I'm surprised to find such a direct, predictable, and negative effect. So I'm totally convinced of my theory that drinking coffee has instantly negative effects on my tranquility.

Sigh. Conclusion . . . be even more sparing when drinking coffee. :( It's so yummy. I don't think I want to give it up entirely yet, but I have to be so careful with the people around me afterwards.

Also, I've started thinking about the issue of sugar recently as well. I drink coffee very, very sweet, so as well as the caffeine effect, I think I'm also getting a sugar rush. AND I've noticed that at times when I eat lots of sugary foods (which is often, cos I love cookies, cakes, ice cream, flavored milk, and chocolate!!!!!!), such as the weekend and during holidays, my moods tend to be a bit more extreme and I can easily become irritated and snap at people (again, most often, my bf). I've heard that hyperactive kids shouldn't have too much sugar but I've never really heard much about sugar's effects on our moods and whatnot. I think I'll try to do a bit more reading about that. (Although, before reading anything, based on my observations of myself, I'm pretty much convinced of this theory - that sugar destabilises my moods and
makes me end up cranky and depressed - already.)

Anyway, it's really got me thinking about my whole relationship to junk food. Tonight when I was coming home on the bus, feeling bad about snapping at the person at work, all I wanted was just to get home and hole up with some ice cream or chocolate. But I think that ultimately makes me feel worse because of the negative effects of the sugar. So I think it's weird that I want to comfort myself with something that actually ends up making me feel nuts. It's so not
good self-nurturing.

I feel like there's some big and illuminating self-realisation coming out of all this - the thoughts about junk food and about when I snapped at the person at work (because I know I was totally doing the thing I accused her of doing, AND the thing she did that made me irritated in the first place is exactly the same thing I do in certain situations). This chain of thought is all
leading me somewhere (I mean, about my character . . . not the fact that I have to reduce the amount of processed foods and sugar I eat (although obviously I have to do that too. Sob!)) that I feel will be a big step forward in terms of my personal health, spirituality, and serenity. I guess I'm not quite there yet.

The caffeine and sugar that's still buzzing round my system makes me want to know the answer NOW, instant gratification, automatic relief from the irksomeness of thinking about this, immediate smoothing of all the rough edges so that I can pretend I am perfect again (or that I never was/am imperfect, anyway).

But I have to slow down and wait. Be slow and calm, breathe, pray and keep my heart open, and the truth will be revealed to me. Whether we like it or not (and most of the time we don't!), God gives us what we need to grow and become better people. I want to learn to welcome that kind of nutrition more lovingly and calmly, and learn my lessons without hurting others in the process.

I've been pretty crabby for the past few months. Maybe it's all the sugar I've been eating? I cycle through this over and over again . . . centering myself and realising what's good for me, sticking with it for a while, then slowly slide back into bad habits.

If only Muslims had been forbidden to eat junk food, the way we are forbidden to eat pork or drink alcohol! I know I would have the will power to do it for God (fasting during Ramadan, anyone?). But I struggle to just do it for my own sense of health and well being. Anyway, I'm going to try again!

More sleep (or lack thereof)

2009-07-12T00:14:00.002+09:00

Making that big post about sleep and CIO yesterday was quite cathartic. I feel sort of released, in some way, from my obsession with the sleep issue. Of course I still thought about it a good many times today, but without the same sense of desperation.

I don't have a very coherent post to make about sleep now, but just a few more thoughts.

1. One of the reasons I question the cry it out method is because I wonder if there is a long term loss for a short term gain. Cry it out is part of a world view in which everything should be achieved now. In the long term, I want to have a strong, trusting, responsive and open relationship with my son. This, I believe, will make disciplining him easier and more effective. By disciplining, I don't mean punishment, I mean teaching him how to act in a self-disciplined manner. I worry that if I did cry it out, it might bring about a gain right now in terms of his being able to fall asleep, but the emotional/psychological effects might impact our relationship later negatively.

2. I realise I'm talking about cry it out in its absolute worst form. I know people can implement cry it out more humanely than I'm presenting it.

3. Thinking about it with a somewhat clearer mind today, I don't understand cry it out would be appropriate for our situation anyway. I don't have a baby who can't go to sleep by himself. I have a baby who simply refuses to sleep! I don't understand why, if he won't sleep when coaxed by me, he would magically start falling asleep instantly in his cot if I cried it out with him?

4. I agree 100% that, long term, baby needs to be able to self-soothe. But I actually think he does have some self-soothing skills. During the day, I've noticed him wake up and put himself back to sleep during naps. I believe he's awake because he chooses to wake himself up rather than self-soothe, not because he's incapable of self-soothing.

5. I'm not going to judge anyone who does cry it out. I'm thinking about what might be lost in the process of cry it out, but who knows? Maybe those babies gain some kind of resilience (or something else) that my baby won't. People make the best decisions they can at the time, and God knows what's going down and why, so it's not my job to judge!

Anyway, the past two nights, I tried harder to put him to sleep. Last night, I stayed in the bedroom with him for 1.5 hours trying to put him to sleep, and tonight I stayed here with him almost 2 hours. Then I took him out to the living room so his Dad can have a turn with him while I have a rest (and write in my blog). I can actually him getting grizzly now (baby, not Dad! ha ha). It might be time for him to have some more milk.

But I can't catch a break! Last night, baby went down pretty early (for us) and was in his cot by 9:45pm. He woke up again about 20 minutes later, and was actually crying because he wanted to be asleep for once! It took a pretty long time to settle him and about an hour later I finally laid him down in his cot again. Five minutes later, the phone rang and startled him awake again. After that he was too agitated and was awake for about two more hours. Things like that -- the phone ringing -- are constantly happening at inopportune moments.

Sleep, the state of the world, and me

2009-07-09T09:31:00.008+09:00

Uuuurrrrggghhhh . . . . sleep. Or lack thereof.

My baby has had less than the recommended 14-16 hours of sleep most days out of the last month or so. I feel like such a bad mother even writing that. As always, we're making progress but it is so slow and by such small strides that it can be hard to remember it is there.

Baby seems okay, for the most part. He is growing well and is around the 75-90% percentiles for height and weight (67.5 cm and 8.2 kg at his 4.5 month check). He has lots of quiet alert time, and is learning new things. He's hitting all the developmental milestones on track. He's happy. We have some times that are a little more difficult when he is tired but not asleep.

Mama, on the other hand . . . not doing so good. I am really obsessed and upset about his sleeping habits at the moment. I got quite uptight about it when he was about ten weeks old. I think that was because we were approaching that (supposedly) magic three month mark. I was beginning to suspect there was NO WAY this would simply resolve itself within in a couple of weeks and his sleep pattern would have settle by three months (which up until that point had been my assumption). I became really upset and sort of stopped enjoying my time with baby because I was so frustrated about the sleep.

I did calm down about it, and managed to get my head back to a space where I was able to just be with the baby and enjoy him without worrying about everything else, masha'allah. But about a month ago, as we approached baby's 4 month birthday, I found myself getting upset about it all over again.

Vaccinations seem to send his sleep habits into a tail spin. After his 4 month vaccinations, we had almost two weeks of 4am bedtimes. Insane. That made me realise that things actually had settled down a lot in terms of sleep. They are starting to settle a bit again.

But Mama is really obsessed with this topic again, and I feel myself getting more upset and uptight about it again.

I keep praying, 'Please God, finish this. Let this situation be over and let us get some sleep.' In my heart of hearts, I know that I still haven't learned what I'm supposed to from this. Poor baby. It is hard for him while I figure out my part in it all.

Things I've learned from the situation so far:

1. Not to let my emotions about one thing colour everything else. I do this most of the time -- when I get upset about one thing, then everything seems terrible. About this sleep thing I'm learning to compartmentalise my emotions and be able to say, Yes, I am upset about this, but I still love being a mother, I still love my son, and I am proud of the progress we've made.

2. Stay in the moment. Something else that's hard for me, often due to what I mentioned in number 1! When I think to myself, we have hardly had a proper night's sleep in 21 weeks, and I see no end in sight, I end up frustrated, angry, and depressed. I'm learning to forget about that and come back to this moment, which is never so bad, and to be kind and gentle with us as we are right now.

3. Don't judge. Before I was in this situation, and I read about a mum whose baby slept like mine, I would totally have judged her and thought it was all her fault. I'm not saying I (or any other mother) have made no contribution towards the situation, but I've learned that outcome does not always reflect the intention, that hard work is not always obvious in the results, that people may struggle with situations far more than is apparent, and if they seem less concerned than I think they should be, it could just be because they are trying to make the best of a bad situation. So I have learned that I should reserve judgement on others.

I still think there is more for me to learn.

I am starting to feel that it is time for his sleep patterns to settle. I feel that he is old enough now (4 months, 3 weeks) for that. Let me backtrack. When he was a newborn, I did what the books said: tried to put him to sleep when I saw he was tired (admittedly, it took me a while to figure out how to read his sleep signals, and especially to recognise his overtired state), and not wake him up when he napped. Since birth, he's taken super long daytime naps -- up to and beyond 3 hours if I don't wake him (which I wasn't). I didn't do anything to try an establish a routine then because my understanding was that baby's sleep patterns were erratic at first but tended to settle down (of their own accord, as I understood it). So I was trying to follow his signals and wait for the erratic patterns to settle and a sort of routine to emerge, that I would then focus on reinforcing.

Uh, no routine emerged. One lesson is, I guess babies need more guidance than the books make it seem like! From the beginning, I have had trouble getting him to put together a night time sleep from 7pm or something like that. He would go to sleep around 7pm but wake up at 10pm or 11pm . . . I assumed he was just waking up for a feed, so I'd feed him and then try to put him back to sleep. He would fuss for the entire time, and I'd keep persisting, until he'd eventually conk out 2-4 hours later. Eventually I stopped trying to put him back to sleep, because it upset him so much, and just worked on keeping him (and me!) calm, hoping that would make the transition back to sleep easier. Also, a vicious cycle emerged with him and me waking late after a late night, being super tired during the day after not sleeping at night, so taking long daytime naps, then being awake later at night. Other issues that I think affected (and continue to affect) it are the lack of natural light in our basement apartment, and the fact that my husband gets home late after taekwondo so the activity in the house of an evening starts at around 9pm.

The most consistent thing about his sleep patterns has been 1-4 hours at night when he refuses to sleep. It has cycled through all times of the night. He's had awake periods from 10pm - 2am, 1 am - 5am, even 4am - 7am. It has settled down a bit. Now it's just hard to get him to go to bed, but once he is asleep for the night, he will usually go back to sleep after his feeds. He has built up to a 7 hour sleep stretch, but he still wakes for feeds 2-3 times in an 11 hour period.

I keep trying to figure out WHY this is happening -- apart from the fact that God willed it so. I mean, is there an earthly reason for this? For example, last night he was awake and fussy (actually he was kind of fussy all day), and around 1am, he pooped. Immediately, all the tension went out of his body and he was smiling, calm, and happy. I changed him, and fed him, and he was asleep in bed within half an hour of that poop. Things like that make me think there might be a connection between my diet and his sleep habits, but (I haven't kept a diary, just tried to observe) for the life of me I can't see a pattern. The two foods I think it might be are eggs or tomatoes, but sometimes I eat them and he seems fine, and other times, not. Anyway, I'm constantly wondering if there's some physiological reason he's unable to settle and sleep easily. He also seems to have allergies, and I wonder if the constant mucous-y nose affects his sleep too. I can't figure out any reason he won't sleep easily in terms of other things like the room's temperature, the bedding, his clothing, daily activities, amount of time spent outside, the bedtime routine . . . anything. I wonder if he is scared of sleep, or scared of being alone when he wakes up. (For several reasons, co-sleeping is not a choice for our family. He sleeps in a cot right next to our bed.) Limiting his daytime sleep (which I have done, and am doing again now in order to try and encourage him to sleep more at night) hasn't consistently seemed to help him sleep better.

A couple of days ago I moved a chair to create a nice, quiet place out of the way of the activity of the (small!) apartment to feed him and hopefully settle him to sleep. Great idea, but the last two nights he cried as soon I sat us down there!

Of course, his personality is a contributing factor. He fights sleep, and he is a determined little guy. When he feels himself starting to fall asleep, he starts wriggling and moving around and making noises, just to wake himself up.

And, of course, I am a contributing factor too. And this is where my head has been for the past couple of weeks. I've been thinking about what I did when he was a newborn that might have contributed to this situation, and what I will do differently with another baby. Of course, next time the whole situation will be different anyway, but I will definitely try to do more to nudge baby in the right direction in terms of morning wake up time, appropriate times for naps, and early bedtime. Who knows if it will work but that is my plan.

These days when he wakes up and calls for us, I pick him up and try to get him back to sleep for a little while, but if he starts getting upset, I change tactic and just try to keep him calm.

When I was a teacher, one of my weaknesses was that at times, I didn't like giving the hard truth to the kids. Sometimes, their work really was crap, but instead of saying, 'This is not good enough, do it again', I'd look for the one good thing in it and say, 'Look at this good thing. Well done.' It was kindergarten and they were only 4-6 years old, so they didn't need too much harsh truth! But as I continued teaching and began to recognise myself doing this, there were times when I felt that I had done a disservice to the kid by not being more straight up with them.

And this is the rub in terms of baby's sleep habits: am I doing a disservice to him by trying to soothe him through his nighttime wakefulness and soothe him to sleep? Is it better to give him the harsh truth: this is sleep time, kiddo, so do it?

Cry it out is a constant shadow over my head. So far, nothing else has worked at getting him back to sleep easily and consistently: keeping him in the cot and soothing him in there, taking him out of the cot, keep him in the bedroom, take him to another room, lights on, lights low and dim, no eye contact, eye contact, talk to him, don't talk to him, walking around, sitting down, lying down with him on the big bed to try and get him off to sleep, playing with him, not playing with him, nursing, dummy, no nursing or dummy, patting, rocking, singing, trying to pick him up and feed him before he wakes up, sitting with him and pretending to be asleep, me holding him, his daddy holding him.

What what I have not tried is: putting the dummy back in his mouth, giving him a little pat or kiss, and walking back out of the room.

Fundamentally, I disagree with the premise and concept of cry it out. (For a little baby, that is. It becomes a more appropriate strategy as a child gets older, I think.) The idea that babies should develop self-soothing skills is a good one, but as a method, I think cry it out is based on assumptions that are wrong. To me, some of the assumptions cry it out is based on are:

1. Babies are selfish. (They unreasonably want people to attend to their needs.)

2. Babies try to manipulate caregivers. (Babies cry on purpose to make caregivers do what they want.)

3. Babies don't deserve a response. (Crying is manipulative and not communicative, and therefore is not worth responding to.)

4. Babies do not have autonomy. (Babies are agents to be acted upon and controlled.)

5. All babies are the same. (Everybody should be the same, and those that are not must be corrected and controlled. Sleeping patterns outside the ordinary must be corrected.)

6. You have to be cruel to be kind. (Leaving baby to cry it out is hard, but ultimatley it is the kindest thing you can do.)

7. Parents can be in control.

8. Life is controlled, orderly, and neat.

I don't agree with any of the statements above, except for number 2, which can be true on occasion but is certainly not true as a blanket statement. I believe that babies cry (and do everything) for a reason, and although that might not always be easy or convenient, it is our responsibility as parents to try and figure out the situation and solve it in a kind and gentle way. I've heard all those stories of the amazing successes of cry it out, and although it may work, I feel it is not a kind method. Babies (including my baby) do need to learn to self soothe. To me, it seems impossibly harsh to expect a little baby whose age is still measured in weeks to 'tough it out' in the 'real world' and simply learn to expect that help is not forthcoming when he or she wants it. Maybe babies learn to self soothe with cry it out, but not because they are guided, nurtured, and shown how to self soothe, but just because they have to after they have given up believing that someone will come to help them.

I also feel that cry it out is part of something larger -- a view of the world and how we should be in it. Life is NOT controlled, orderly, and neat, and the idea that we, as parents, or as individuals, are in control is an illusion. Life is wild, messy, puslating and hot with emotions and actions and the brush of our existences against each other. We are not in control, and it's not our job to be. We are riding the waves of God's plan for us, and our job is just to try and swim with the current. We can't swim without getting wet! We must take a deep breath and dive in to our messy lives, feel it rush over our skin and believe, in the middle of the ocean with nothing but waves and lonely calling birds as far as we can see, that God is taking us to a good place. Cry it out is part of a mentality that has no space for the slow and steady beat of our kind and loving hearts. It is part of a mentality in which things should be convenient, and packaged neatly, and a baby should be a mini-adult right NOW.

I am super worked up about cry it out . . . I have to keep railing against it because I fear that I might end up doing it -- not because I believe it is right, but just out of self-doubt and hopelessness.

My son's sleep habits continue to develop so slowly. My own resources seem more and more depleted. And now I am wondering if I am being too soft on him. Thinking back to how I wasn't good at giving the harsh truth to my students, I wonder if I am indulging him by not making him sleep (how on earth do you MAKE someone sleep, apart from leaving them there until they do it?)

Another concern for me about cry it out is that it impacts negatively on a child's self esteem because it is based on a premise that the baby is just wrong, and needs to be corrected. I don't want my son to grow up feeling that he is wrong, and needs to be corrected! Also, I want him to grow up with a really strong sense of self-esteem. Every parent wants that for their child, and everybody needs self-esteem, but I feel like he will really need it, because he is going to be different in colour and religion from most people he will be around. He is going to have to make decisions (for example, no pork-filled little hot dogs when he goes to a birthday party!) that are going to be hard and will set him apart from his friends in a way that might seem tough for a little guy. I want him to look out and see a world that is exciting and interesting, and feel like he is awesome and the world has a place for him in it.

As for myself, I was very shy when I was young, and feel that I have struggled with self-esteem issues for a lot of my life so far. Probably I will be struggling with them for the rest of my life too. I feel pretty good these days, but seeking and understanding my self-worth -- trying to believe and live the fact that God Does Not Make Junk -- is something constant in my life. When I was younger, there were some quite torturous moments in my life due to my shyness. In my late teens/twenties I got into some fairly self-destructive habits due to self-esteem issues. I really, really don't want my son (or any other children I may have) to have to be (self) tortured by shyness or low self-esteem like I was.

So.

I think what I am working towards is realising that my son's sleep habits, although his own, are not separate from me, and the narratives of my own experiences, my strengths and weaknesses. I am realising that my way of dealing with this sleep issue (even its creation as in 'issue' in the first place) is as much about my own anxieties and fears as it is about him and/or sleep itself.

I read a little about zulm in 'Believing Women' in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an by Asma Barlas. It is not a long discussion of it. I will copy a couple of sentences from page 14.

. . . although "severe, strict, and unrelenting [in] justice", God
"never does any zulm to anybody". To do Zulm (in the Qur'an) . . . is "to act in
such a way as to trangress the proper limit and encroach upon the right of
another person".

Thinking about zulm as it was discussed in Barlas' book has got me thinking that to follow that example in my own behavior, an important thing is not to do an injustice to anyone through my actions. Relating this to the sleep issue , justice is probably not the right term. More along the lines of just not doing harm to anyone (my son) through my behavior regarding his sleep. Sometimes now, when he is awake late, I do worry and feel that perhaps I am starting to do him harm by failing to help him get a good sleeping pattern.

So it's this awareness that my own issues are coming into play in the way I'm handling this sleep issue, and my desire not to do any harm to him, that leads me to worry and doubt myself. Even though intellectually and emotionally cry it out does not make sense for/to me, when I start worrying about my baby, I wonder if I am just delusional in my ideas about nurturing and guiding, and cry it out is the 'right' way to solve this situation, and I am doing more harm than good by trying to solve it another way.

Do we have to be cruel to be kind? Can't we just be kind to be kind? That is what I want to believe. Why do I feel such passion about this and have the willpower to uphold myself to a higher level of conduct when it comes to my baby (I really don't think he has any idea about how much I'm struggling with this or about the level of frustration I feel when he is almost asleep and I see him force himself to open his eyes and wake up even though it makes him unhappy), but find it so much harder to be kind all the time to adults, including my husband? Am I harming my baby by refusing to cry it out?

I don't know how concerned baby really is about his sleeping habits, but Mama certainly has a lot of emotions about it.

The Shape of Me and Other Stuff

2009-06-30T20:27:00.004+09:00

Yesterday I bought this book for my son. It's called The Shape of Me and Other Stuff, by Dr. Seuss. It's a board book, so I'll let him touch it. He always wants to reach out and touch the books, and I like to let him do that, but he already managed to get a hold of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See and bend the cover a little bit. Of course, as soon as he got a hold of the board book he tried to stuff it in his mouth. I stopped him from doing that. It might be frustrating for him not being able to play with the books as he wants to, but I guess these are some of his first lessons (besides the language and visual lessons) about how different objects can be touched/played with in different ways, how sometimes we need to sit quietly and listen, and how sometimes Mum says no! Ah, books. Is there anything they can't do?

Here's an excerpt from The Shape of Me and Other Stuff:

Suppose YOU were shaped like these . . .

. . . or those!

. . . or shaped like a BLOGG!

Or a garden hose!

Of all the shapes we MIGHT have been . . .

I say, "HOORAY

for the shapes we're in!"

This book is really good for babies because the pictures are all solid coloured silhouettes. Most of them are black, but there's also some other colours too. He was sooo excited when I read this to him -- kicking his legs and almost fighting me to be able to touch it! I'm really amazed at how much a small baby can like books.

I also wanted to buy him a cloth book because he really wants to touch the books and I feel kind of sorry for him not being allowed to! I bought Animals, by Roger Priddy. (This small picture of the book in its packaging was the best I could find.) There's a rattle/teether attached to the spine as well. The border of each page is black and white, and the pictures are all simple and bold. He's been pretty interested in it -- mostly interested in putting the teether into his mouth. He sucked on the pages a bit too.

I bought these books at a local foreign bookstore called What the Book?, not the big one where I bought the other books. What the Book? has a lot of board books, and even some 'bath books' (didn't know products like that existed before yesterday!). That's good, because the big bookstore didn't have much in the way of board books.

More TV -- and the park

2009-06-28T01:32:00.002+09:00

I've been thinking more about TV. It's a blessing and a curse. We've never had cable before, but got it when Son was born because I was sitting on the couch 24/7 breastfeeding, which got a leetle boring. TV was the perfect solution at that time.

Now, we watch so much TV . . . you would never believe we got by for the previous four years without it. (We had a TV but the reception was so crappy we could barely watch it, and only one of the channels was in English, anyway). Last night, I was nursing baby to sleep . . . of course, the TV was on . . . it was an action movie with guns, swords, bombs, missiles, fires. Lots and lots of guns.

I felt really sad that those were the noises going into baby's ears as he was drifting off to sleep. Just sad. He has probably heard, via TV, more gun noises already at four months than I had heard when I was quite a few years old than him. Sad, sad, sad.

Yesterday and today we went to the park and hung out there for a while. It's not really a park -- it's a 'botanical garden' and there's no grass where you can sit. There's just lots of paths to walk around, and benches to sit on here and there. So we hung out on a bench. Yesterday I took Son to the park by myself, but today my husband came too.

Being in the park is the opposite of sitting there listening to gun noises on the TV! So lovely and calm . . . it's hot here at the moment but we went later in the day when it was a bit cooler. I like trees. When I am surrounded by them, I always feel that life is simple and good.

Baby was so happy. He loves being outside. When I get out the wrap that I carry him around him, and show it to him and ask, 'What's this? What does this mean? We're going outside, right?', he smiles and paddles his little legs so excitedly. He loves to feel the air on his face, and he likes plants. Today he was in a place he likes, seeing things he likes, with a mummy and daddy who dote on him. He was happy, and I felt like we were doing something right.

Sex and the City

2009-06-24T19:19:00.004+09:00

I've been watching Sex and the City late at night (or early in the morning) when Son won't sleep. So I've pretty much been watching it every night. It's up to the episodes now when Miranda has had her baby. Some of the stuff she is going through is so real. It seems stereotypical, but it's true. So a lot of that stuff has touched me and seemed quite poignant. A couple of times my heart has really ached for her. I loved when she was completely frazzled at home and she said, 'I have to go and pretend to be a lawyer now.' That's sort of how I feel, about everything . . . just pretending to be all these grown up roles while everything feels like it's in chaos!

What I think the show hasn't done well is integrate Miranda's new role as a mother with her former life as a fabulous single woman. Basically, she just has a babysitter and her former life as a fabulous single woman seems to continue on pretty much as before. I think it would have been good to see them solve that binary in a more interesting way.

Anyhoo, I was thinking about something that I was going to write about Sex and the City (which I now cannot remember), and when I was composing the post in my head, the start of it went like this: I've been watching Sex and the City. I know that's haram, but . . . ' (Haram means not permitted. It's the opposite of halal, which means permitted.)

So. I don't know that much about the process by which things are declared halal or haram. I'm pretty sure it is a process of inference based on firstly, things God said in the Quran, and secondly, the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him). That's basically how scholars figure everything out. The first standard of guidance is always the Quran, and the second is the practices of the Prophet (called sunnah). Some parts of the Prophet's sunnah have been recorded, and these collections are called hadith.

It doesn't take a genius to guess why Sex and the City would be considered haram. But then, I think about most of the TV shows I watch, and I think most of them would be considered haram by some for one reason or another. I put 'by some' in that previous sentence because I don't want to give the impression that Islam is a monolithic thing, or that stricter Muslims (who would definitely find all these things haram) are the true Muslims who really uphold the word of God while the rest of us are at various points on the slippery slope towards hell.

Firstly, I can see I need to find out more about the reasoning behind declaring certain things halal or haram. I was going to write, 'most things in Western culture would be considered haram', but is that true? I don't know. That kind of thinking (of which I am a participant too!) just reinforces the opposition of Islam and Western life. It would be more interesting, and productive, to think about the ways in which Western practices are halal or haram while thinking outside of those stereotypes.

Secondly, what are we going to teach our kid/s about all of this? Isn't it pretty hypocritical to say, 'Oh yeah, these things are haram, but we watch them anyway?'

An important part of Islamic practice is niyyah, or intention. The presence or absence of intention is an important factor in how your actions are viewed by God. For example, in Islam you're not supposed to just wake up one day and decide to fast. You should make it your intention the night before, and then fast the next day. Having the intention to fast the next day is an important part of Ramadan. Another example is before salat (the Islamic ritual prayer). You should make it your intention to pray salat. If you pray without intention, the prayer is not as good as if you prayed with intention. (What I thought was, well, if I'm standing there on the prayer mat with my scarf on my head ready to start saying the words, then surely my intention is implicit? But what I've noticed is that I can really pray quite mindlessly at times. The idea about making your intention to do something is really about keeping oneself mindful of one's actions, I think.)

I think it will be important to teach our kids good critical thinking skills, and to remember to be aware of intention. I think it's not so bad for me to watch Sex and the City if my intention is just to pass half an hour with something frothy and fun and entertaining. If I started to change my lifestyle habits, basing them on that show, that would not be okay. So we have to teach our children that they should maintain an intention to stick to the principles of Islam, and to view popular culture (TV, movies, books, music, magazines etc) with a critical (as in critique, not criticism) and evaluative eye.

The Sneeze Song

2009-06-23T02:34:00.004+09:00

Today I composed a song for my son. It's called 'The Sneeze Song'. It goes like this:

What do I say when I sneeze? A-choo!
I say, 'Alhamdullilah'.
What do I say when you sneeze? A-choo!
I say, 'Yar hamuk um Allah'.

When a Muslim sneezes, s/he should say, 'Alhamdullilah', which means all praise be to Allah.
When another person sneezes, a Muslim should say, 'Yar hamuk um Allah,' which means may Allah bestow His mercy upon you.

I had to look it up on the internet to figure out the spelling. My husband taught me to say 'Yar hamuk um Allah', but when I looked it up on the internet, I only saw 'Yar hamuk Allah'. I guess that little 'um' is a Ghanaian Muslim thing!

Unfortunately my son didn't seem too interested in The Sneeze Song. He was much more entertained by a song based on a classic line from some books in The Baby-Sitters Club series, 'silly billy goo goo'!

God supports breastfeeding!

2009-06-18T00:21:00.005+09:00

God wants us to breastfeed!

Mothers shall suckle their children for two whole years; (that is) for those who wish to complete the suckling. The duty of feeding and clothing nursing mothers in a seemly manner is upon the father of the child. No-one should be charged beyond his capacity. A mother should not be made to suffer because of her child, nor should he to whom the child is born (be made to suffer) because of his child. And on the (father's) heir is incumbent the like of that (which was incumbent on the father). If they desire to wean the child by mutual consent and (after) consultation, it is no sin for them; and if ye wish to give your children out to nurse, it is no sin for you, provide that ye pay what is due from you in kindness. Observe your duty to Allah, and know that Allah is Seer of what ye do.

The Holy Quran, 2:233

I love breastfeeding my baby. Being able to do so feels like a gift, and I am very grateful for that. My goal is to breastfeed him for at least a year, and after that, we will see what will work for our family.

This verse from the Quran illustrates someting I have realised about Islam that a lot of people don't realise, I think: it is very reasonable. First, it starts with the command: breastfeed for two years. Later in the verse, comes the qualifier: weaning before that is okay if it has been discussed and agreed upon between the parents. How reasonable! Most things in Islam are like that. God lets us know the ideal, but usually provides a way for us to do it part way if the ideal is unachievable for a good reason. It's really like God is giving us as many chances as possible to choose to live according to his guidelines.

New books for baby

2009-06-15T23:41:00.007+09:00

I went shopping last Friday for some books for my son. The quality of the English books in the book shops here is high. Basically all of the English books they sell here are classics in their genre, or recent bestsellers. If you want books on a somewhat obscure topic (like Islam, for example!), it is practically impossible to find them in the major book shops. Actually, in our area, near the mosque, there is an Islamic book shop but I haven't been in there yet.

We're Going on a Bear Hunt is the story of a family going on a bear hunt (surprise, surprise!). The book alternates between black and white illustrations with repetitive text that tells the story of the bear hunt and what the family comes across (a field of grass, mud, a river), with a full colour illustration and text describing the sound the family makes as they walk across or through the obstacle they've come across. They come to a cave, and what do you think they find in there? Something that sends them running back home!

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? has repetitive, chant-like text, and contains vocabulary about animals and colours. The illustrations are bright and beautiful, by Eric Carle. This book was always popular with my students when I was teaching, and is one of my favourites.

I hadn't ever seen Chicka Chicka Boom Boom until I came to Korea and began teaching kindergarten. When I was googling for ideas for teaching the alphabet, I'd always come across activities based around this book. I finally got to read it last year and it is a fun book about the lower case letters of the alphabet climbing up a coconut tree.

My son seemed to respond best to We're Going On a Bear Hunt. Part of the text includes the word, 'Uh-oh!', and after first couple of times he heard it, he giggled every time I read that word. It was so cute. I'm so excited that he is interested in books and I can start to share my love of books, art, and language in general, and favourite classic stories in particular, with a little one.

Sleep

2009-06-09T14:41:00.003+09:00

I've been thinking about this a lot: the other time I posted about my son's sleep habits, I wrote that learning about how to deal with that situation meant learning what God wants from me, but everything I wrote in that post was about what my son has to learn and what he needs to do . . . not that much about my own learning.

My son is good at falling asleep these days, but the timing of sleep is all out of whack. The past week, we have usually been awake from 1am till 3am, having a lovely time . . . but awake when I feel we *should* be asleep. I tend to get quite caught up in the 'shoulds'. I am trying not to stress myself out about this situation again, as I was before. But it plays in my mind a lot.

I don't even really pray about this situation, I realised last night. And I don't know what I want to pray for, either. When I do pray about it, I pray for the strength to be calm and accept the situation, and not to transfer any bad feelings I might have about it to my baby.

I definitely think one thing I'm supposed to learn from this is how to just stay in the moment, and not get caught up in thinking about all those shoulds. I was just writing about this sleep thing in a personal journal I share with my family, and I felt kind of embarrassed, and like I should apologise for myself and my baby. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it would be better to have him sleep like a 'normal' baby . . . but if I can just mentally stay with where we are at right now, focus on him, and remember that life is right now, whether it is the way I want it to be or not, that embarrassment slips away, and it is all just an opportunity to love and be loved, and to live in this wonderful role God has blessed me with, a mother.

Another thing I've been thinking about, is to remember that God has not only given me this situation in order to teach me something to improve my shortcomings, but because I also have something that I can contribute positively to it. I mean, there's something good about my personality that is making this situaiton easier and better for all of us that it might otherwise have been. So that's a lesson, too.

And now that I've been thinking about prayer and praying about this situation, I think it's an opportunity to learn how to ask God for the things I want. It feels almost greedy to me to ask for things. I usually pray to be able to accept situations I find myself in rather than asking to change them. That's probably not always a good thing, if it's born out of feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem. God doesn't want any of us to feel like we are not worthy.

I have been good about doing salat all the time, but don't have a good habit of making personal supplications to God. I'm going to focus on doing that, too.

What I have found with personal supplications is your heart has to really be open and clean about the situation you are praying about, though. Like, there's no point praying about this sleep situation before I really know what exactly I want to pray for. When I'm confused or sort of in knots about something, I can feel it in my body and mind, and in my prayer, which I can feel is only skimming the surface. Sometimes I am smart enough to just tell God, hey, I don't know what I think about this . . . mostly I just pretend I know what's going on and give these half-hearted little prayers.

A month or so ago, I was with a friend, and she told me, "God does not make junk". Hearing that statement, and thinking about it in relation to the sleep thing, cleared out a lot of bad feelings I had about that, and I was able to pray very purely about the situation for a few days afterwards. Now, I feel sort of clogged up again in my feelings abut the situation.

I was just going to write, 'I need to unclog myself, so that I can pray for this sleep situation'. But isn't that backwards? I should just pray to become unclogged! I remember a friend talking about how something she was working on was feeling that she had to be perfect before she could come to God. That's exactly what this is like. I feel like I have to be in a perfect state of mind about this sleep thing and have it all worked out before I can lay it before God . . . when really I need His help just to cope with it, imperfectly, day by day.

When I converted, I felt (actually, I still do feel) quite inadequate as a Muslim because I didn't (don't) know everything about it. But I thought to myself, God would rather I was an imperfect Muslim, than an imperfect non-Muslim. It's the same. I guess God would rather see me imperfect and making personal prayer, than imperfect and not making personal prayer.

This is something I love about Islam, about the relationships I am learning to see and feel between myself, the world, and God. Everything is a great big assurance that God loves me and that I'm worthy of that.

I've totally lost my train of thought and concern about the sleep thing . . . that's good. I'm thinking about God instead.

Baby baby baby

2009-06-05T01:29:00.002+09:00

I have wanted to have a baby for . . . forever. I have been imagining having a little baby for so long. And my baby is so much more than what I imagined. I keep saying, even if I had had a million years to try and dream him up, I never could have even got close to how wonderful he is.

Thank you Allah for blessing me so much.

Playing with baby after prayers

2009-05-29T13:39:00.004+09:00

My son really loves having fabric touch his face -- blankets, clothes, towels, you name it. Now that he can grab things and move them around a bit, he is constantly pulling things to his face and rubbing them against it. It is just beyond cute when he is sleeping and he pulls his little blanket close to his face and snuggles into it.

When I am praying salat, I wrap a pashmina around my head as a scarf. It is just cotton with little tassels on the end, and really soft. My son always smiles at me when I put it on. So cute. I think he likes the way I look without hair! After I have finished praying, I play with him for a minute or two while I'm still wearing the scarf. I tickle his face with the tassels on the scarf and trail the fabric all over his face. He loves it. I think it is a cute way to create a great association between feeling happy and loved, having a little fun, and prayer time.

Gotta start studying . . .

2009-05-28T00:43:00.002+09:00

Thinking about my last post I realised one of the keys to all of this (having to teach my son about Islam) is that I have to become more familiar with Arabic. When I first came to Korea and was greeting people in Korean or ordering food in a restaurant, it was totally robotic and I just said the syllables without understanding what I was saying. Now, I really understand what I'm saying when I speak (my limited) Korean. If I increase my familiarity with Arabic, I think remembering to say and teach those Arabic Islamic phrases will be easier. Not to mention it would be better for my Quran memorisation too.

So right now, on a scale of one to one hundred, I would say my Arabic would be, oh . . . level one. If that. I have memorised what I have to say for salat and a few surahs and that's it. I have learned about half of the Arabic alphabet, although I'm not sure I could identify the letters right now without reviewing my book. So I have a lot of work to do.

I think it's so lucky -- okay, not lucky . . . God's plan for things is so amazing. My experiences in Korea, seeing how Korean parents who aren't familiar with English support their children's education in English. I think I've learned a lot and will have a lot of ideas about how to help my son become familiar with Arabic, even though I'm not good at it. Most probaby we won't be surrounded by many Arabic speakers when we are back in Australia, so the responsibility for teaching him will fall to my husband and I. I love teaching so I'm sure I'll jump in to do as much as I can even though my husband knows waaaaaaaaaaaaay more Arabic than me. Anyway, I'm sure if I hadn't had this experience in Korea, my attitude would have been very negative and I would probably have dismissed the possibility of helping my son to become familiar with Arabic when I barely know it myself.

So I guess he and I will be learning together. A friend gave us an alphabet frieze of the Arabic alphabet. First thing, I should stick that up in a prominent place so I can study it!

Islamic sayings and etiquette

2009-05-25T23:25:00.005+09:00

So far I haven't really learned or fallen into the habit of using all the little sayings that form a part of Islamic etiquette. Even my husband and I just greet each other saying 'hi' or something like that, rather than saying 'Assalamu alaykum' to each other. When we first got together, I wasn't a Muslim, so we didn't start out that way, and now it's just a habit that we follow.

Since my son was born, I've been thinking about this a lot more. When he sneezes, we try to remember to say 'Yarhamuk Allah' to him. My husband is good about this, but I forget a lot. I know from my experiences teaching that as a teacher, if you don't practice what you preach, the kids won't do it either! So I think it's not just a matter of saying 'Yarhamuk Allah' or other sayings to him, but we have to model the behavior as well. So my husband and I must start to say those things to each other.

What makes this feel weird to me? Being a native English speaker, it just seems awkward to start peppering my life with sayings in Arabic! I have wondered whether it should be expected of non-Arabic speaking people to say all those sayings all the time . . . but I think it's probably worth it. One, those sayings aren't just meaningless etiquette, but they do help to remember God more often throughout the day, if one keeps in mind the meaning of what one is saying. Two, they are useful to know for interactions with other Muslims.

I guess the reason I thought it might not be necessary for non-Arabic speakers to use those sayings is that it seemed like a kind of public posturing and not necessarily related to the inner level of belief. In the Australian culture I grew up in, religious belief was a very private thing. Even in my own family (I was raised as a Catholic) we didn't have discussions about faith. At my high school, there was a group of final year students called 'MSC associates' ... it was supposed to be a group in which they explored and deepened their faith. Perhaps they did. But to my skeptical mind, it appeared that membership of the group was closely linked to popularity, and the people in that group didn't seem particularly spiritual in the way they lived their daily lives around school. So it seemed like a public show of being in the group that wasn't followed up by actions. So I'm not used to the idea of publicly showing faith and having that be meaningful.

But Islam is a public religion, I think, as well as a private one. Islamic practices filter into every aspect of daily life. And another thing about Islam is that actions can have value, even if the intent or faith isn't maximally behind it. Like, it's still worthwhile to recite something from the Quran in Arabic during salat, even if you don't understand it exactly. It's better if you can recite and understand, but recitation without understanding is still okay. Lucky for converts! It's sort of like the idea of doing what you love, and security will follow . . . . pray and act as if you mean it, and eventually you will mean it . . .

As I write that I realise that what I mean is that saying those Arabic phrases feels sort of hollow to me, because it's not my language and they don't have that much meaning for me, apart from being things I know Muslims should say. But if I start saying them and using them regularly, then they will come to have more meaning for me.

My husband and I need to make a list of all the things we need to remember to say. And I need to practice!

My experience with labour pain

2009-05-22T00:37:00.002+09:00

When I was preparing myself for labour, one thing that I repeated to myself over and over again, was that God does not give anyone more than they can bear.

Quran 2:286
On no soul doth Allah Place a burden greater than it can bear.

I wanted to have a natural labour - no drugs, basically - for a couple of reasons. As far as the health of myself and the baby went, the main reason I didn't want drugs was because I wanted us both to be maximally alert after the birth and in the first few days after, for bonding and getting started with our life together. I didn't want the baby to have trouble sucking the breast, for example, due to a kind of 'hangover' effect from any drugs. Masha'allah, baby and I were fine and we got off to a great start.

A couple of months before my birth, I was IM chatting with my sister, who was also pregnant. We were talking about labour, birth, and interventions. I remember she said she didn't see any reason to experience the pain of labour per se, but it was better to feel the pain than to have unneccessary and potentially complicating medical interventions.

Later thinking about it, I realised that for me, thinking about God's promise that we won't be given more than we can bear, there is a reason to experience the pain, just as pain . . . .

I wasn't taking any prenatal vitamins when I first got pregnant, because I assumed that I would have difficulty conceiving and wasn't expecting to get pregnant for ages. When I did get pregnant, I spent the first part of my pregnancy, until I was about 16 weeks, TERRIFIED of having a miscarriage. I kept crying (in embarrassing places, like on the bus) just from worrying I would have a miscarriage. I prayed every day for the safety of my baby. It wasn't peaceful, trusting prayer -- just scared and tense. I realised a spiritual lesson for me during my pregnancy -- and I expected afterwards, in motherhood as well -- was going to be TRUST. Leaving my desire to control everything (which is basically distrust that everything will be fine) behind and trusting God to take care of me and my baby. Trusting that my body would work. Trusting that my baby would be safe and grow strong and healthy inside me. I think that trust is fundamental to being a Muslim because as a Muslim one has to know that God is in charge and to really accept and live happily and peacefully within that intellectual framework requires a lot of trust in God.

So as I approached labour, I felt that experiencing the pain per se had implicit value because it was an exercise in trust, in believing that God would not give me more than I could bear, that He would carry me through it and I would be safe. I hoped that the process of experiencing the pain in labour, which is the act of trusting, would be a spiritual journey that would bring me closer to God. I expected that as I experienced the contractions, I would feel comfortable, safe, and secure, and aware of how much I trusted God.

Labour was much more painful than I expected. I had read so much about how labour pain is different to the pain of illness, it's a positive pain that is a sign your body is working properly and it is a productive pain because it brings the baby out into the world. I had this idea that it would be a sort of indistinct, soft pain. Actually, it just felt like regular old pain, and it hurt!!!! My labour was pretty long, so it hurt for a long time. I had also read that labour pain was a clean pain, because between contractions it was completely gone, and you got a little break to rest and get ready for the next one. The time between contractions was not nearly as refreshing as my reading had led me to believe! So I was in a lot more pain, for a lot longer and with a lot less rest, than I had anticipated.

Did I ride this out with peaceful serenity, confident and calm, with a constant awareness of God? NO. I struggled, completely overwhelmed by the experience. It was just way more than I expected, and it didn't let up. I wasn't able to mentally regroup and come back to myself and my pre-labour thoughts and ideas. I just endured, a lot of time in a fog, some of the time feeling quite depressed, and definitely got to the point where I thought I couldn't cope with it anymore. I felt like someone groping blindly in a misty forest . . . lost and not sure how to get out. I spent a lot of time during the labour and birth feeling like I couldn't cope -- wasn't coping -- with the experience. I think 'lost' really is the best word to describe how I felt -- small and confused and overwhelmed.

After the birth I felt really disappointed in myself. I hadn't had the presence of mind I had hoped for during the labour. I hadn't been upbeat and positive. I felt that I hadn't borne the experience in the right way and that I had failed in my attempt at trusting God.

But what I think now is this: God won't give any of us more than we can bear, but He will definitely give us more than we think we can bear. My experience of labour and birth took me to my absolute limit, because I got to the point where I truly believed I had passed my capabilities and couldn't do it anymore. When I was having trouble pushing my son out, I was just thinking to myself, I can't do this, how much longer are they going to keep me trying to do this before they give me a c-section? I can honestly say I had no thought in my head at that time except my helplessness in the face of the experience. I believe that at one point I did kind of give up.

Eventually the doctor said to me, "Your baby is getting stressed. We have to get it out, and you have to do it." At that point I sort of felt, I am not getting a 'get out of jail free' card on this one, I actually have to do it. I gave five big pushes and the baby came rushing out.

I passed my limit, and thought I was done . . . but there was a little bit more. That step past my limit, that was where I got closest to God. I wasn't aware of it at the time. I wish I could have been more mindful of God during the whole thing. It certainly wasn't the conscious spiritual journey I was hoping for. But I believe I reached a place where I met God's plan for me, and I said yes. I'm still such an imperfect Muslim. But I wish I could write and say and live how wonderful it is to be cradled when we want to be, if only we can trust. Trust that we will be cradled, even when it feels like we are falling. Trust that beyond our limits there is more, and that more is the beauty of the perfect love of God.

Learning about baby means learning about what God wants of me

2009-05-10T16:59:00.005+09:00

We are having trouble getting my son to fall asleep. Sometimes he wants to stay awake and he fights sleep soooo hard.

It's hard for me to handle. When it first started, I was just worried that his growth and development were going be negatively affected by a lack of sleep. Then I started feeling stressed because I am so tired and felt like I was never going to get a good night's sleep again. (Actually, I still feel like this, but it's not the main issue.) Recently, I found myself bypassing stress and just getting obsessed about the situation -- really resenting it, thinking about it all the time and letting it cloud every interaction I had with my son. I wanted him to change, to be different, to learn how to sleep so I didn't have to deal with it anymore. Getting him to sleep became a chore. The fact that he wouldn't go to sleep when I wanted him to became the thing that defined him.

The stress and obsession built up to the point where I just bawled when he wouldn't go to sleep and felt quite angry at him. The last week was really rough. I didn't handle it well at all. A few days ago, things hit the worst point.

But I realised . . . this is not about my son sleeping or not sleeping -- this is about me accepting what God has given me and learning and growing from this experience as God wants me to.

God has matched me with my son, and created this situation for us, for a reason. My son has his own things to learn from this. As his mum I have to help him as much as I can. I hope I will be able to teach him that falling asleep is safe and pleasant. But I can't keep all the focus in the situation, or my framing of it, on my son's behavior. I need to focus on my own behavior as well, and re-frame the situation as a blessing from God to aid me to a higher spiritual awareness.

Form and structure

2009-05-01T21:07:00.002+09:00

I am the happiest I have ever been since I became a Muslim.

I'm the kind of person that can go with the flow, to a certain extent, but I like to have a structure that I can rely on as well.

Before, I felt untethered and buffeted by what I thought was the randomness of the universe. I was going with a flow that seemed to have no roots. I couldn't see the structure of life, the form of it.

Becoming a Muslim has enabled me to see it. Now I know God's plan is the structure and the enactment of that the form. Instead of untethered, I am centered and rooted within something.

The virtues of pregnancy

2009-04-08T22:35:00.002+09:00

A friend directed me to this website about the virtues of pregnancy in Islam. We are so blessed by God -- with pregnancy and birth, and with all the rewards we are given for it.

http://www.shariahprogram.ca/women-islam/virtues-of-pregnancy.shtml

Long time gone . . .

2009-03-17T17:16:00.006+09:00

It has been a long time since I posted but I have a good excuse! Our son was born last month and he has been keeping me pretty busy since then. This blog is not supposed to reveal too much about my family but I think one photo of my gorgeous baby is okay. :)

So far being a parent is both easier and harder than I expected. Something I've realised is that I don't really have to "know" how to be a parent . . . if I am open and attentive, and try to listen and learn from the baby, he will show me what I need to do. Luckily at this stage (he's a baby but I'm also a baby parent), his needs are not that varied, so we can usually figure out how to meet them. In that sense, it's easier than I expected. What's harder is actually letting go of my desire to be in control, and be the one who knows things.

What's also hard is that I haven't prayed salat for one month, because of the lochia. I hope it finishes up soon, because I miss praying salat. This shows me I've grown spiritually . . . before I was pregnant, when I couldn't pray due to menstruation, I always felt a little bit of a guilty pleasure that I could cross the responsibility of praying salat off the list for a week or so. Now, I just miss it.

A simple explanation of why I became a Muslim

2009-02-10T20:55:00.002+09:00

When people have asked me why I became a Muslim -- no, let me rephrase that. People don't usually ask me why I am a Muslim! They usually ask me [insert long chain of gendered and racial stereotypes here] if I'm a Muslim because my husband is.

The answer to that is no! Of course, he has played a huge role in teaching and inspiring me to be a Muslim, but has never expected or forced me to become one. When I was thinking about becoming a Muslim, I really questioned myself whether I wanted to do it because of the relationship, or if it was something I actually thought was right. I tried to imagine how I would feel about being a Muslim if the relationship disintegrated . . . could I still see myself following Islam then?

The answer to that was yes, for a whole host of reasons -- reasons that I find very difficult to articulate, in a simple way, when people ask me (sort of) about why I am a Muslim.

Last week I was listening to some music, and the lyrics of a song called "I'll Never Know" by Tim Finn suddenly popped out at me as summing it up so nicely:

I'll never know
What came over me
I only know
You show me how to live differently

I don't know why I felt compelled to take up a religion that comes from, and has, such a different culture to that in which I was raised. (Not that I believe they have to be mutually exclusive, of course!) But in Islam, I saw a way to live differently -- better, more truthfully, more mindfully, more gently, more blessed.

Islamic rituals for our baby's birth

2009-02-09T14:52:00.005+09:00

Last night my husband called his family to ask about the Islamic rituals we should perform for our baby's birth. His dad said that he should call the azan (the call to prayer) into the baby's right ear three times, and call the baby's name into the left ear three times.

In case you are not familiar with the azan, here is the meaning of it in English:

God is greatest. God is greatest.
I bear witness that there is no god but God.
I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God.
Come to prayer.
Come to success.
God is greatest. God is greatest.
There is no god by God.

My father-in-law also said that it is traditional to sacrifice a sheep, and then host a gathering for everyone to eat the meat and celebrate the baby's birth. We will send money to Ghana for them to do it there, as we don't know how to organise it here. I wish we could be there for the party!

When we were talking about this a few weeks ago, my husband asked me what were the things usually done in Australia for a baby's birth. I was like, umm . . . nothing, really. People just visit and sometimes bring a present. I suppose in the past when most white people there were practicing Christians, the baptism/christening was the big event. It seems now that that has, for most people, gone by the wayside, nothing has emerged in its place yet. I'm not saying visits from family and friends are not important, or meaningful -- I'm just saying it's not ritualised, as these aspects of Islam are. (For example, even in Korea, visiting a new mother and baby is more ritualised. Only family should visit for the first three weeks, and friends after that.)

I wish we were in Australia so that we could have the visits from our family and friends there too. But I love that through Islam we have some rituals with which to mark and celebrate our baby's arrival. Even though we are somewhat isolated here, it makes me feel as though the birth of our baby is bigger than just an event for us, or our family and friends . . . it's a religious event, a community event, an event that links us closer to God.